The British Dyslexia Association (BDA) opened a call for proposals for its 8th BDA International Conference, Dyslexia: Beyond Boundaries, to be held 28-30 April 2011. Abstracts may be submitted through the BDA Web site.
Archive for the 'News' Category
Sphere: Related Content
The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) declared the week beginning 9 May 2010 to be “Exceptional Children’s Week.” Pass it along!
In “City Pushes Shift for Special Education,” New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina made the same mistake that many reporters before her have made. She used “learning disabilities” as a synonym for “students with disabilities.” I wonder what Ms. Medina’s editor thinks the term “learning disabilities” means.
Continue reading ‘Yet another misuse of LD’
Justin Wise and colleague examined the reading comprehension of students with differing problems in reading fluency. Some of the students only had difficulty with reading connected text fluently, but others had difficulty in reading connected text and individual words fluently. They found that for both groups the ability to read individual real words fluently was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension.
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether different measures of oral reading fluency relate differentially to reading comprehension performance in two samples of second grade students: 1) students who evidenced difficulties with nonsense word oral reading fluency, real word oral reading fluency, and oral reading fluency of connected text (ORFD), and 2) students who only evidenced oral reading fluency of connected text difficulties (CTD).
Continue reading ‘Word reading still predicts comprehension’
Over on Spedpro I posted a notice about the opportunity to apply for a Jeanne S. Chall Research Grant. Applications are due by May 14, 2010.
Deficits in reading performance may differ in etiology depending on the IQ of the individuals who have the deficits. According to an article in Behavior Genetics, Professor Sally Wadsworth and colleagues confirmed previous research showing that there is a stronger genetic element in the reading deficits of children with higher IQs (mean = 108.97 ± 6.71) than those with lower IQ (mean = 82.85 ± 6.40). The heritability for the former group is 0.75 ± 0.12, but for the latter it is 0.50 ± 0.10.
Continue reading ‘More on IQ and reading disabilities’
In “2-Year Colleges Help Learning-Disabled Students Break Into Math and Science,” Ashley Marchand reports about efforts to support students with Learning Disabilities succeed in post-secondary education settings. Ms. Marchand’s article appeared in the news source of record for higher education, the Chronicle of Higher Education.
For as long as he can remember, Robert T. Calloway has had a fascination with engineering and all things mechanical. He wanted to pursue an engineering career despite a diagnosis of dyslexia, which challenged both his confidence and his ability in the classroom.
Continue reading ‘Promoting success in college’
In an article slated to appear in Remedial and Special Education, Jeanne Wanzek and Sharon Vaughn reported that widely popular three-tiered approach to addressing did not significantly reduce the number and percentage of students identified for special education across seven elementary schools. Their study, which is limited to the response to instruction or intervention in the primary and early elementary grades and focused primarily on academic intervention, revealed no significant reduction in identification of children as having Learning Disabilities, even though this group would be the most likely to benefit from such prevention efforts. Similarly, there were no differences in the proportion of students identified for special education according to ethnic background.
Continue reading ‘Does RtI reduce numbers of children in special education?’
A research team in Professor Leo Blomert’s lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands reported that brain scans of children with and without dyslexia reveal differences when associating letters with sounds. Vera Blau and colleagues studied 34 9-½-year-old children, 18 of whom were identified as having dyslexia. While the children completed tasks under four different conditions (letters presented only visually; speech sounds presented alone; multi-sensory matching letter–sound pairs; and multi-sensory not-matching letter–sound pairs), the researchers obtained scans of brain activity. They found that in the brains of children with dyslexia there were weaker effects when letters and sounds matched than in the brains of children without dyslexia; these effects appeared most clearly in certain areas of the brain related to language function. In addition, the dyslexic readers’ brains showed weaker activation when speech sounds were the only stimulus (i.e., without accompanying letters).
Continue reading ‘Letter-sound correspondences: New scanning data’
Is LD viable?
L-to-R: T. Scruggs (foreground), D. Fuchs, M. Gerber,
and N. Zigmond
At the behest of Rollanda O’Connor, Dan Hallahan gathered four informed people—Naomi Zigmond, Tom Scruggs, Mike Gerber, and Doug Fuchs—to address this question: “The LD Construct: Can it be Saved? Is it Worth Saving?” The discussion, which was held at the annual international convention of the Council for Exceptional Children, as a product of the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD). Of course, I’m biased (I am compensated as the executive director for DLD), but I have to say that this was a top-notch event.
These advocates agreed that there really is something to LD. They argued clearly and effectively that educators need to reconsider the construct of LD; focus on individual students needs; the needs of those students can (in fact) be discriminated from others who have low achievement; that there’s lots of good to response to instruction (or intervention), but it’s neither likely to address all the learning problems students experience nor identify those who need additional services; and that those students may need instruction that is radically different from what they can get in general education settings.
There’s lots more to what they had to say, and I hope TeachingLD can capture and disseminate it. If so, I’ll relate it here.