Dan Malloy, who is a candidate for governor of the state of Connecticut, has Learning Disabilities, according to a story by Susan Haigh for the Associated Press and carried in the Stamford (CN, US) Advocate. The story includes some familiar references (e.g., mental retardation). The Learning Disabilities angle is not just a small part of it, either. I hope Mr. Malloy’s disability does not become a campaign issue.
As a child, Malloy struggled to read, calculate math problems, tie his shoes and even walk steadily. He suffered from dyslexia and motor control problems at a time when the term “learning disabilities” was uncommon.
Link to the Ms. Haigh’s story.
There is further coverage on I Speak of Dreams.–Admin, 31 May, 3:45 pm.
A group of parents in Manteca (CA; US) whose children have Learning Disabilities is expressing concerns about their children not receiving diplomas because of scores on graduation competency tests, according to a story in the Manteca Bulletin. Some of the parents of these students believe the schools, not the students, have failed.
The debate over court rulings and appeals on whether the senior exit exam will determine whether high school seniors receive their diplomas has left 60 Manteca Unified School District students with a certificate of completion instead of their diplomas.
Some of those students are learning disabled whose parents say have fallen through the cracks of the education system.
“They are trying to hold children and parents accountable for the school’s failure,” said Stacy Ingraffia whose 13-year-old son, Vinny, suffers from dyslexia.
There are other intriguing aspects of this story, too. One has to do with the types of services available and another has to do with the local education agency’s child-find efforts. I hope to follow up on these and determine whether they are actual problems or my misunderstanding of the reporting in the story.
Link to the story.
Fergus Falls (MN, US) schools personnel failed to explain to a student who was ineligible for recognition as a member of the school choir, and the local education agency is now legally obligated to provide special education awareness training for faculty members, according to a story by Sarah Horner of the Fergus Falls Daily Journal. Matt Solin, who has Learning Disabilities and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, apparently had not met the graduation requirements and, therefore, was not honored along with other graduating members of the school choir, despite his participation in the choir for four years.
It was not the first time Solin felt left out during his high school career. Solin said he was also excluded from a junior and senior choir trip to New York City because staff thought he might pose safety issues.
But he was not informed of his ineligibility until after he completed the fund raising required for the trip.
Mr. Solin filed a complaint with the US Office of Civil Rights, which apparently reached an agreement with Fergus Falls schools. The LEA must provide in-service training that is supposed to promote understanding of the rights of students with disabilities among high school staff members.
Link to Ms. Horner’s story.
Over on EBD Blog, I have posted the abstract of an article reviewing co-morbid problems in literacy and emotional and behavior disorders.
In the 60s and 70s, after extensive investigations about the relationship between visual perception and Learning Disabilities, most of those working on educating students with Learning Disabilities abandoned the hypothesis that reading performance was affected by visual-perceptual processes. The diagnostic tests of visual perception had weak psychometric characteristics, alternative explanations (especially problems with phonemic awareness) fit the problem more closely, and research showed that training perceptual processes produced little or no benefits.
In the 90s, however, a different hypothesis about the relationship between visual perception and reading problems arose. In this version, the theory is that among people with dyslexia the magnocellular or large-cell system of the brain, which processes fast-moving objects, interacts poorly with the parvocellular (small-cell) system that processes patterns and colors. The evidence for this hypothesis comes from several lines of studies, including one that compares how well individuals with and without reading disability detect movement in visual stimuli on laboratory tasks. Another line of evidence comes from fMRI studies of differences in brain activity when individuals with and without reading disability view moving and still images. Still another line of evidence comes from the interpretation of studies of eye movements during reading; when people read, their eyes move systematically across lines of text, fixing on a bite of text and then jumping to the next bite. Individuals with reading disabilities have fewer fixations and are more likely to look back at previous text than their peers who do not have reading problems. According to the magnocellular hypothesis, this is the result of the faulty interaction between the systems because the magnocelluar system controls eye movements.
F. Hutzler, M. Kronbichler, A. M. Jacobs, and H. Wimmer devised a clever means of testing this hypothesis and reported about it in Neuropsychologia. Here’s the abstract:
During reading, dyslexic readers exhibit more and longer fixations and a higher percentage of regressions than normal readers. It is still a matter of debate, whether these divergent eye movement patterns of dyslexic readers reflect an underlying problem in word processing or whether they are – as the proponents of the magnocellular deficit hypothesis claim – associated with deficient visual perception that is causal for dyslexia. To overcome problems in the empirical linkage of the magnocellular theory with reading, a string processing task is presented that poses similar demands on visual perception (in terms of letter identification) and oculomotor control as reading does. Two experiments revealed no differences in the eye movement patterns of dyslexic and control readers performing this task. Furthermore, no relationship between the functionality of the participants’ magnocellular system assessed by the coherent motion task and string processing were found. The perceptual and oculomotor demands required during string processing were functionally equivalent to those during reading and the presented consonant strings had similar visual characteristics as reading material. Thus, a strong inference can be drawn: Dyslexic readers do not seem to have difficulties with the accurate perception of letters and the control of their eye movements during reading – their reading difficulties therefore cannot be explained in terms of oculomotor and visuo-perceptual problems.
Hutzler et al.’s conclusion—their “strong inference”— pretty much says what needs to be said here.
Link to the article by Hutzler et al. and a flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz for pointing me to an analysis by Joel Schneider that led me to the article.
Over on Teach Effectively! I have a post about the report by K. Walsh, D. Glaser, and D. D. Wilcox of the National Council on Teacher Qualilty of their study of the instruction about reading that propspective teachers of reading receive in teachers’ college. The entry has the title “Reading instruction instruction.”
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