An article from the Colorado Springs (CO, US) Gazette describes an award given to a teacher for helping students with Learning Disabilities develop self-advocacy skills. Under the headline “D-12 teacher an ‘American Star’: Award honors creation of program for learning-disabled teens,” Shari Chaney Griffen reported that Alan Pocock, a teacher in a Colorado Springs high school, was recognized for developing a program called “Learning and Educating About Disabilities” (LEAD). LEAD helps high school students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD to prepare for college.
The US Department of Education provides the award that Mr. Pocock received. He is one of 51 recipients of it for this year.
The award program, part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, annually recognizes one teacher from each state and Washington, D.C., for innovative teaching strategies, making a difference in the lives of students and improving academic performance.
“He’s a poster child for that criteria,” said Salle Howes, a parent and past president of Learning and Educating About Disabilities Foundation in Colorado Springs.
Howes nominated Pocock for the award for his work in creating the LEAD program, which helps college-bound students with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder build on their strengths and overcome weaknesses. Students learn about their rights as students with disabilities and how to advocate for themselves.
Link to Ms. Griffin’s article. Link to the Colorado Learning and Educating About Disabilities Foundation site that had a feature about the award as of this date. Google items about the “American Star of Teaching” award. Link to a US Department of Education data base showing recipients of the American Star of Teaching award.
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Professor Dorothy Bishop of the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology found the evidence favoring Dore Achievement Center efficacy to be wanting. Writing in an official journal of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Professor Bishop cautioned physicians and other clinicians not to accept inadequate evidence for the program.
Dore Achievement Centres are springing up world-wide with a mission to cure cerebellar developmental delay, thought to be the cause of dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia and Asperger’s syndrome. Remarkable success is claimed for an exercise-based treatment that is designed to accelerate cerebellar development. Unfortunately, the published studies are seriously flawed. On measures where control data are available, there is no credible evidence of significant gains in literacy associated with this intervention. There are no published studies on efficacy with the clinical groups for whom the programme is advocated. It is important that family practitioners and paediatricians are aware that the claims made for this expensive treatment are misleading.
On LD Blog I have previously expressed doubt about the Dore program. You can read those entries: Going backwards, Dore dinged, and Dore more (the last includes a comment by Chris Tregenza, who advocates the treatment).
Bishop, D. V. (2007). Curing dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by training motor co-ordination: Miracle or myth? Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 43, 653-655.
Link to the abstract for Professor Bishop’s article.
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In a study that received some national press coverage, Professor Lee Kern and colleagues reported the results of a study designed to assess the benefits of (a) parent education aimed at teaching parents how to tailor behavior management procedures to the needs of individual children with ADHD in comparison to (b) parent education that addressed general issues in child development and parenting. Although they discuss the improvement of the children in the two groups, they did not find significant differences between them on a wide array of measures.
Recent research suggests that symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may begin to emerge in children at a very young age. Given that early onset is associated with more deleterious outcomes, early intervention is imperative. In the current study, we evaluated the effectiveness of two different interventions with children aged 3-5 years. A multicomponent intervention combined parent education and individualized assessment-based intervention in home and preschool or day care settings was compared with a parent education intervention consisting of parent education alone. Both interventions resulted in significant improvements measured by standardized assessments of behavior and preacademic skills. There were no significant differences between the intervention groups 1 year postintervention. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.
The study is entitled “Multisetting Assessment-Based Intervention for Young Children at Risk for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Initial Effects on Academic and Behavioral Functioning” and, in addition to Professor Kern, the authors are George J. DuPaul, Robert J. Volpe, Natalie G. Sokol, J. Gary Lutz, Lauren A. Arbolino, Mary Pipan, John D. VanBrakle. It appeared in School Psychology Review, issue 36, number 2 in June 2007. There is more about the project available from a news release by Lehigh University, where several of the authors are on the faculty. There are links to videos of Professors Kern and DuPaul discussing the research.
Press coverage is available from USA Today (Easy non-drug help aids ADHD kids) and CNN (Some techniques to help 3- to 5-year olds with ADHD).
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I’m not in my usual geographical space this AM. It’s also not my usual sonic space; I’m listening to a local radio station while I’m having coffee in Cool Beans on the west side of Richmond (VA, US). On the radio I just heard a 30-sec advertisement aimed at parents and seeking children who manifest a list of symptoms of or have been diagnosed as having ADHD for a study of an “investigational medicine.”
Perhaps advertisements such as these are common in larger metropolitan areas, but it was a new one for me.
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Over on EBD Blog I posted an entry about research on young children with ADHD. Some folks might find it interesting.
Dore some more
In case you missed it (I did), the Dore program was embroiled in a bit more controvery in the winter of 2007, enough to merit an editorial in Nature Neuorscience. The editorial recounts the resignation of members of the professional editorial board of Dyslexia over publication of two studies of the Dore treatment, points out problems of potential conflict of interest, describes the theory and practice of the Dore program, reports the two studies that form the base for the controversy, and recounts selected aspects of the scholaraly criticisms of the studies. The spoon that stirs the controversy, however, is that non-scientific factors are interferring with orderly analysis. According to Nature Neuorscience, at least two people who have said that the scientific evidence for the program’s effectiveness is weak have been subjected to legal pressure to withdraw their criticisms.
Nature Neuorscience goes on to indicate that questions about the usefulness of any treatment should be determined in an orderly scientific manner, not as a consequence of political or other unfalsifiable methods. If decisions are based on commerical or legal interests, consumers will not be able to depend on researchers for honest opinions.
Nature Neuroscience, by the way, is a relatively new journal (it’s only 10 years old) that rose rapidly to the top echelon of scholarly publications in neurosciences. It routinely ranks in the top five among its peers for its “impact factor,” a measure reflecting the relative frequency articles published in a particular journal are cited by in other publications.
Link to the editorial (access probably costs unless you’re hitting it from a university that has rights to it). Links to previous posts on LD Blog are here and here. Also see the many entries Liz Ditz has on this subject.
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