News, commentary, and resources about Learning Disabilities
Pete and Pam Wright recently launched a blog, so let’s welcome them to the neighborhood. Their contributions via the rapidly changing form of blogs promise to be helpful. You can read the blog on the Web or, of course, subscribe to it with your favorite RSS reader.
Flash of the electrons to Christina Samuels of On Special Education for alerting me to this.
Parents who are members of the Mashpee (MA, US) Mashpee Special Education Parents’ Advisory Council (SEPAC) have created an extensive Web site with extensive resources at Mashpee SEPAC. Are there other similar sites created by parent groups? Please add links to any that exist by posting them in comments.
Here’s an interesting research project: Equip a house with a host of highly sensitive audio-video recording devices that pipe the data into cluster of high-powered computers which have an array of very capacious storage devices. Using this system, document the language environment in which a child is raised and record the child’s language development. Pretty nifty, hunh? A petabyte of developmental data!
This is, in fact, what a couple of parents—Deb Roy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, US) and Rupal Patel (Northwestern; Boston, MA, US)—have been doing for the past few years.
The high-powered academic couple—he directs of the Cognitive Machines Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, and she directs the Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory at Northeastern University—scrambled to convert their suburban Boston home into a state-of-the-art research center that would host the most ambitious study ever conducted on how children acquire language. They named the linguistic data-mining odyssey the Human Speechome Project (HSP), a marriage between “Speech” and “Home.”
Why’s this relevant for LD Blog? Well, other research (especially Hart and Risley’s excellent work as summarized in Meaningful Differences, but note that there are many related studies in the research literature) has shown that differences in language environments have substantial effects on children’s language (e.g., vocabulary). Many Learning Disabilities are associated with problems in language (e.g., low phonological awareness, atypical syntax, problems in morphology, poor pragmatics). Understanding the language environment in which children develop their language skills might help explain some of the problems we see among children with Learning Disabilities.
Am I blaming parents? Nope. Language experiences that some children have may actually have protective effects. But, some experiences apparently are predictive of later outcomes. It would be good to know.
Am I saying that Learning Disabilities are environmental, that they have no biological components? Nope. I’m not saying that they do or do not have biological features. But, imagine that there are biological predispositions and that some language environments prevent or mitigate the manifestation of disability. That would be worth knowing, I’d say.
To complete a project examining the contribution of language environments to Learning Disabilities would require a prospective longitudinal study of substantial size. Supposing that Learning Disabilities appear in 5% of the population, then to get a enough children with Learning Disabilities to make the study reasonably sensitive, one would need 2000 families; at 5 per 100, that would yield about 100 children with Learning Disabilities. Now, if one were clever, she would look for families where there were siblings so that one could also examine the shared and non-shared environments, and start to factor in the contribution of genetic factors.
Imagine the financial cost of such a study….
If you could have a switch that would stop the recording at any time, would you agree to have such a system record your interactions with your newborn all the way through toddlerhood?
Meanwhile, to learn more about the Human Speechome Project, check these resources:
Joe Torgesen, Barbara Foorman, and Richard Wagner of the Florida Center for Reading Research published an excellent overview of dyslexia that is readily available for public download. Although the title, “Dyslexia: A Brief for Educators, Parents, and Legislators in Florida,” makes it sound as if it is only applicable to people in a specific geographical area bounded by arbitrary marks on maps, this paper will be useful to millions of people.
In the document, Torgesen and his eminent colleagues address questions such as these: What is Dyslexia? What type of instruction is most effective for students with dyslexia? and Can reading difficulties in dyslexic students be prevented? How effective is remedial instruction for older students with dyslexia? The writing is clear as well as clearly well-informed.
This document will be valuable to people in PreK-12 schools, students studying education and the professors who should be teaching them the contents of the document; parents who are seeking straight talk with the authority of firm scientific underpinnings; and advocates who can benefit by distributing a tightly reasoned and written document to help explain concepts to constituents.
Snag a free copy from the Florida Center for Reading Research.
Adrienne Edwards of Dyslexia Tutor: News-Resources posted an entry about the potential influence of head trauma on learning and behavior.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, by Thomas M Burton, researchers at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York believe they have found a common thread running through many cases of seemingly unrelated social problems: a long- forgotten blow to the head.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5.3 million Americans suffer from mental or physical disability due to brain injury.
But what is new in this research is the contention that there are many other cases where a severe past blow to the head, resulting in unconsciousness or confusion, is the unrecognized source of such problems.
Link to Ms. Edwards’ post.
Brain Gym (Skeptic’s Dictionary)
Wheeeheee! Over on the Skeptic’s Dictionary, Robert T. Carroll has a take-down and pin of Brain Gym. The contemporary incarnation of some ideas that were thoroughly discredited in Learning Disabilities in the 1970s, Brain Gym is making something of a splash. Shoot, it even appeared in one of my Curry School colleague’s classes for a while, as I understand.
Professor Carroll’s indictment of Brain Gym presents a good opportunity to make an important point. The problem with Brain Gym and many of its siblings is not that the activities might not be worthwhile, it’s that the advocates over-reach so substantially. Shoot, I’m glad to advocate that we teach kids who might fit the clumsy category how to walk, move, dance, play basketball, and etc. I just don’t want people to be sold a bill of goods about how doing so will improve those children’s reading, etc.
Read Professor Carroll’s analysis. Need info on the research about the benefits of perceptual-motor training? Here’s a link to a meta-analysis.