Monthly Archive for January, 2006

License plate

Published on 31 January 2006 in Comments. 3 Comments

I shot this photo through my windshield, so it’s a bit obscured, but it’s still readable. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the owner’s message, but it seems to me that the owner is probably proclaiming her or his professional role. If my interpretation is accurate, I’m really glad that this person is proud enough of teaching individuals with Learning Disabilities to proclaim it so publicly. I wonder if I could find the person and invite him or her to talk about teaching students with Learning Disabilities here on LD Blog. I regret not having slipped an invitation under the window wiper…but the ink probably would’ve run and the paper might have obscured the driver’s view.

By the way, I’ve routinely thought that one of the greatest advantages of invented spelling is in aiding one’s ability to read vanity license plates. Otherwise, it’s only good for assessing phonological awareness and first drafts.

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Golf celebrity dyslexia

Published on 29 January 2006 in Dyslexia and The press. 2 Comments

J. B. Holmes overcame dyslexia to advance through college before quitting school to begin pursuing a career as a golfer, according to Damon Hack writing in the New York (NY, US) Times. Mr. Hack leads with an illustration of a bad shot Mr. Holmes made when practicing as a youth and connects this to his difficulty with completing school work.

Holmes’s [golf practice] sessions were born of a love of golf, but also a dread of going inside to do homework — the letters of some words would flutter around the page.

Holmes, a rookie on the PGA Tour, said he thought he was dumb. His parents went on the premise that he simply was not concentrating.

The extract I’ve included here illustrates both the good and the not-so-good in Mr. Hack’s story. The good? That’s the latter part that sets up this important point: Mr. Holmes’ problems were not because he was dumb or didn’t pay attention.

The bad? The implication that reading problems cause or are caused by perceptual problems, by distortion of letters and words. Later in the article this notion is furthered by quotations attributed to Amy Craiglow, Mr. Holmes’ academic counselor at the University of Kentucky. Ms. Craiglow said that Mr. Holmes was helped by exercises that encouraged him to visualize meanings for words and by placing “diagrams, stickers or note cards around a room and picturing the words in space.”

As well-intentioned and heart-warming as stories such as this one may be, they set us back in our efforts to provide a clear, accurate picture of Learning Disabilities. There may be cases in which visualizing images associated with printed words may actually help people with reading problems, but I suspect that they are few—probably fewer than 1 in a 100,000 dyslexics, I’d guess. Help is more likely to come from systematic, explicit instruction in learning the mapping between print and spoken language. Each report of a mysterious, magic-key solution to dyslexia dilutes the potency of what we know provides the best hope for treatment.

Link to Mr. Hack’s story (free registration required). Meanwhile, congratulations to Mr. Holmes for overcoming his problems and succeeding.

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ADHD on EBD Blog

Published on 25 January 2006 in ADHD. 0 Comments

Over on EBD Blog there are several entries that might have shown up here. This is a list of five posts that have, at the least, some reference to Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder. If either of its two readers came to LD Blog looking for discussion of ADHD, I hope these cross-references (in chronological order) help her or him.

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Liz on more weak writing

Published on 24 January 2006 in Dyslexia and The press. 0 Comments

Over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz Ditz has another entry on how writers too often make a hash when writing about disabilities. Read it here.

Spelling instruction

Published on 17 January 2006 in Comments. 4 Comments

I have robots that search the Web for items about Learning Disabilities. One of them returned a reference to a study published in 2000 that examined the effects of explicit, systematic instruction on spelling performance by students with Learning Disabilities. The study by Craig Darch and colleagues, which appeared in the Journal of Instructional Psychology, provides a good example of how scientifically sound research provides an empirical basis for instruction. Professor Darch and colleagues initially interviewed a small number of students about the ways they approached spelling of words; such small, qualitative studies are informative, but they do not yield results that one can use to guide instruction. However, the reseach team followed that study with a larger-scale study using random assignment of 30 students to groups, repeated trustworthy measurement of spelling performance, and careful control of the instructional conditions. The results of this second study inform practice.

This study reports the results of two experiments which focused on the use of spelling strategies by students with learning disabilities and the relative effectiveness of two different approaches for teaching spelling. In experiment 1, qualitative research method was employed with four elementary students with learning disabilities to document the spelling strategies used during an structured interview, a formal spelling test and an informal writing activity. The data revealed 4 categories of spelling strategies: (1) rule-based, (2) multiple, (3) resource-based, and (4) brute force. Patterns that emerged from the data suggested that students with learning disabilities mostly used inappropriate spelling strategies (e.g., brute force, multiple, resource-based). Based on the results of experiment 1, experiment 2 compared the effectiveness of two highly dissimilar spelling instructional approaches (i.e., rule-based strategy and traditional method) to 30 elementary students with learning disabilities. The results of the experiment 2 showed that students with learning disabilities learned spelling words more effectively when the rule-based teaching and correction procedures were employed in three different probes and one post-test. This study concludes with a discussion of the instructional implications for students with learning disabilities in spelling.

After only 12 lessons, each of which lasted about 20 minutes, the students who received the rule-based teaching spelled significantly more words correctly than the students who received the activity-based teaching. For the technically inclined: Mean number of words spelled correctly was 22 (standard deviation of 2.2) and 16 (standard deviation of 4.3) for rule-based and for activity-based groups, respectively; the difference between the two groups reflects an effect size of ≈ 1.4 (using control s.d.) or ≈ 1.77 (using pooled s.d.), which is a big difference.

The rule-based approach was a commercially available program called Spelling Mastery, an example of a Direct Instruction approach to teaching. It is this sort of powerful instruction that is needed to provide students—whether they have Learning Disabilities or not—with a secure chance to succeed. Faced with evidence such as Professor Darch and colleagues provide (and there’s lots more evidence of this sort), it makes little sense to me for educators to espouse ineffective methods of teaching.

Citation: Darch, C., Kim, S., Johnson, S., & James, H. (2000) The strategic spelling skills of children with learning disabilities: The results of two studies. Journal of Instructional Psychology. 27, 15-27.

Link to the Findarticles archive of the study and a link to Professor Darch’s curriculum vita where one can find references to many other valuable articles, chapters, and books.

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Accurate reporting

Published on 14 January 2006 in The press. 0 Comments

Liz Ditz found an article by Doug Worgul, a journalist for the Knight-Ridder syndicate, that is unusual because it portrays dyslexia accurately. The article is brief and, thus, neither breaks news nor has a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, but it is nice to read something that doesn’t make me grimace. Unlike so many articles in the popular press, Mr. Worgul doesn’t perpetuate myths (e.g., people with Learning Disabilities have counter-balancing gifts), report misinformation (e.g., reversals are a characteristic of dyslexia), or tout sham remedial methods (e.g., Irlen lenses).

Link to the post in I Speak of Dreams and a link to Mr. Worgul’s article.

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LD games

Published on 13 January 2006 in News. 0 Comments

Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) used the old famous-people-with-Learning-Disability bit as a lead for an entry in its blog that is part of the company’s public relations campaign (AKA “advertising”).

What do Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill, and Alexander Graham Bell have in common?

Learning disability.

TIS is a software development company with headquarters in India that creates simulations and games and transforms traditional print content into more technically accessible formats. Other than a few instances of pandering to the public, TIS claims to develop “end-to-end solutions that screen and identify children with learning disabilities, and offer remedial action as well as a tracking system to monitor their progress.” Sounds good, no?

Could be good, but who knows? As evidence, TIS offers endorsements by various agencies and companies. I’m not ready to accept those data as strong evidence. Show us the data!

As one or two of the three readers of LD Blog may know, I have a fondness for technology in education, having fiddled with it for the better part of 20 years. Still, I harbor skepticism about technologies that claim to correct Learning Disabilities. Usually the products are misbegotten examples of quizzing with gratuitous feedback (bronx cheers upon error, fireworks displays for accurate answers) or superficially sensible sequences of activities that supposed to address underlying processes (e.g., deducing the sequence described by a series of objects). I am certain there are better things available, but I don’t know enough about them. (My much-admired colleague Mable Kinzie has led a graduate class on developing learning games; I should investigate the work they produced.) Whatever they are, we need to see the empirical examinations of their effects. Show us the data!

Neither the TIS blog entry nor a PDF document describing the products provide data.

The good news, according to the blog entry, is that TIS supports a local (a) hospital by performing systems analyses and programming data management activities—excellent use of technology!—and (b) employees running footraces (7K, halfathon, and marathon) to raises funds for Learning Disabilities.

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Parent site with missteps

Published on 8 January 2006 in Comments, Families, Not LD and The press. 0 Comments

Sandy L. Cook hosts a Web site aimed at helping parents understand and “circumvent” their children’s disabilities. She has a lot about home schooling, dyslexia, and such. In addition to her professional qualifications (mostly in technology), she has waded into education for students with Learning Disabilities, having been led there by her children.

Sandy’s children collectively have severe dyslexia, dysgraphia, executive function deficits, and ADHD. After battling the public schools for five years, and filing a successful due process lawsuit, the Cooks found the services offered by the school were inadequate. Reluctantly, Sandy began homeschooling her children and has found the experience rewarding and more successful than she ever imagined. Sandy was able to bring her child with severe dyslexia from a 1.9 grade reading level to a 10.0 grade equivalent within two years of beginning homeschooling, and each child is on grade-level in every subject except spelling!

The Web site is extensive and (for those who are squeamish about such) features advertisements. I’ve not explored the entire site, but I noted that Ms. Cook has some sensible recommendations (e.g., Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons) and a lot about Orton-Gillingham methods. There are, sadly, perpetuations of some misunderstandings; in particular, I spotted recommendations about identifying learners’ preferred modality for learning, the reversals myth, and scotopic sensitivity (see “Dyslexia Symptoms” and “Remediation 1″).

It’s too bad that there is bad material mixed into the good material on this site. I hope that people discriminate between the wheat and the chaff here, and that Ms. Cook does the research and revision that is needed to make her site more useful and less misleading to parents who want to understand their children’s disabilities.

Link to Ms. Cook’s site.

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More good Liz posts

Published on 4 January 2006 in News. 0 Comments

Liz Ditz has been busy over on I Speak of Dreams. Check her entries on

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More celebrity dyslexia

Published on 4 January 2006 in Comments. 2 Comments

During my adolescence (in the previous millenium, of course), I volunteered to help with the tasks of the pit crew for an amateur sports car racing team. I also read magazines such as Road & Track and Car & Driver, learning about sports cars, racing, and the professionals who raced sports cars. Among other stars (Sterling Moss, Caroll Shelby, Jim Hall, Bruce McLaren, Bob Bondurant, Alain Prost, and Graham Hill) there was a driver named John Young (“Jackie”) Stewart. In a few years my attention drifted from racing to other matters (e.g., a young woman named Pat and teaching kids with disabilities, to name two distractions), but I remember that Jackie Stewart was a very successful driver as well as an advocate for greater safety in racing.

My memories of Sir Stewart—he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1972—were jogged when I wrote the entry on celebrity dyslexia yesterday. I spent a little time following up on Sir. Stewart’s work on dyslexia, and I was overwhelmed. It appears that Sir Stewart has approached the task of championing services for individuals with dyslexia with the same determination that he showed on the track. For example, he has been very visible in the press coverage of a university initiative. Here is just a little sampling of what I found:

  • From the Scottish government—Dyslexia Scotland charity launched: A new charity, Dyslexia Scotland, is launched today with the aim of helping thousands of people with dyslexia across the country. It will combine the expertise of two leading charities, the Scottish Dyslexia Trust and Dyslexia in Scotland, and have Sir Jackie Stewart as President and Sir Peter Burt as chairman of the Board.
  • From the Scottish government—New project to improve teaching of children with dyslexia: A pioneering new project at the University of Aberdeen will train new teachers in how best to help children with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, it was announced today. The project will create a new Chair of Inclusive Studies at the University and is the result of discussions between the First Minister, Sir Jackie Stewart, President of Dyslexia Scotland and University Principal and Vice-Chancellor Prof Duncan Rice.
  • From the University of Aberdeen—First Minister to announce major funding award to support children with dyslexia: Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell will [announce funding for a project]…. The First Minister will be joined by former Formula One World Champion, Sir Jackie Stewart, and the Principal of the University of Aberdeen, Professor C Duncan Rice.
  • From the BBC—Dyslexia fight goes into top gear: The charity’s [Scottish Dyslexia Trust and Dyslexia in Scotland] president, former F1 champion Sir Jackie Stewart, said he thought he was “thick” at school before discovering he was dyslexic.
  • From the BBC—New dyslexia role speeding ahead: Motor racing legend Jackie Stewart has visited Aberdeen University at the launch of Scotland’s first professorship in dyslexia.
  • From the Scotsman—Sir Jackie Stewart hails university dyslexia post: SIR Jackie Stewart, the motor racing legend, launched a world first for Scotland yesterday with the setting up of a professorship in dyslexia and other learning disabilities.
  • From the Herald—University to train teachers in dealing with dyslexia: SCOTLAND’S first university professorship in dyslexia has been created to train teachers on how to educate children with learning difficulties. Sir Jackie Stewart, the former Formula One champion driver and himself dyslexic, was instrumental in setting up the post at one of Scotland’s oldest universities.
  • From Dyslexia Adults Link—Formula One Ace Jackie Stewart Attacks Slur on Dyslexic Drivers: Some of the country’s most prominent dyslexics, including Sir Jackie Stewart, the former world racing champion, have reacted furiously to research claiming the condition makes them dangerous drivers.

The coverage Sir Stewart’s participation brought to this event shows actual benefits that can accrue from dyslexia among celebrities. Media’s attraction to celebrities makes it worthwhile to capitalize on their difficulties. Although I have reservations about the motivational value of pointing to famous individuals with dyslexia, Sir Stewart’s contributions here are clear and very valuable.

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