Studying Japanese yields clues for kids with dyslexia learning English

The Wall Street Journal reports on recent research into the use of character-based languages such as the Japanese language kanji.

Learners with dyslexia struggle with the association between letters and sounds in English (a language in which words are comprised of groups of sounds that readers decode). However, character-based languages, where the characters represent complete words or ideas, are mastered through memorization, a skill that many students with dyslexia have mastered to compensate for their decoding struggles.

One study featured in the WSJ article looked at fMRI brain scans of dyslexic students and discovered that they use the same area of the brain to read English as do readers of kanji, a character-based Japanese language. This is different from the area of the brain used by typically developing English readers (and readers of kana, another Japanese language in which characters represent sounds instead of words or ideas).

As the article notes, we don’t cure dyslexia by teaching students in a character-based language. But it does offer some insight into how these kids’ brains are working differently and how teachers might be able to deliver reading-based content more effectively.

We have a link to a fantastic dyslexia study on our Web site. The study, performed at Stanford, is very consistent with the findings discussed in the WSJ article, as it supports the idea that students with dyslexia tend to make reading a more visual task, while typically developing readers integrate auditory processing as well.

 

Getting the most out of computer-based training programs

Computer-based training programs like Fast ForWord and Cogmed can be fantastic interventions for struggling learners because they take advantage of technology to provide precise, adaptive trials. They also provide a game-like format to engage students and allow for comprehensive remote monitoring. In the case of Fast ForWord, they also use complex algorithms to acoustically modify speech sounds to systematically develop processing rates in a way that humans simply cannot (we aren’t capable of slowing down a consonant sound like the <b> in <ba>). We have previously posted about how Fast ForWord uniquely takes advantage of technology to enhance student learning.

A post at Scientific Learning’s New Science of Learning blog addresses some of the challenges related to the efficacy of computer-based training programs. Specifically, it’s important to recognize:

• What the training program is designed to do (and not to do):

These systems do not do the work of teachers; they are tools to supplement teacher instruction and inform educators’ decisions.  They are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a substitute for highly qualified educators. But when implemented and used correctly, computerized learning systems can and dohelp educators identify and address individual student needs and deliver results.

• That the programs don’t do all of the work:

Making these solutions work takes work. They are not “plug and play,” nor are they designed to be a one-size-fits-all magic bullet. Computerized solution take careful planning, hours of professional development, and a deep staff and leadership commitment to following implementation protocols.

This second point is critically important, and is something we spend a lot of time refining. Effective computer-based training programs that are based on research into brain plasticity have a common challenge: adherence to a rigorous, intensive training schedule is critical for success. Both programs we work with (Fast ForWord and Cogmed) require a 5-day per week training schedule (daily schedules vary from 30-90 minutes, depending on the program and the child). In our experience, it is how successfully students adhere to this schedule, more than the degree of their learning challenge, that is the single biggest predictor of success with the programs. In short, the programs can achieve amazing results if kids can comply with the rigorous schedule, and they’re pretty mediocre if kids can’t.

So how do we ensure that kids can stick with the schedule?

While we just got finished saying that that the programs don’t do all of the work alone, they do help. Cogmed and Fast ForWord are both presented in an engaging, game-like format that appeals to kids. There are high scores, reward animations, and other supportive features that appear periodically while students are working. Additionally, the adaptive nature of the programs ensures that students are continually challenged at an engaging level: not so hard that they get frustrated, but not so easy that they aren’t learning. These programs aren’t exactly Playstation material, but they are fun and engaging.

As providers of the programs, we can help too. We monitor each child’s progress daily, so if they start to get off track (missed days or missed exercises), we can quickly engage parents in a solution. Comprehensive progress reports also help. For all students, these reports allow parents to identify the portions of the program that are most challenging and intervene with support where necessary. And the reports can engage older students in their own progress, allowing them to track the improvement of their cognitive skills and identify the areas that are proving most challenging. We’ve found that when older students are connected to their own learning in this way, they are more likely to stick with the prescribed training schedule. It’s a bit like seeing results in the mirror when you’re working out at the gym.

The impact of sleep on sustained attention

This weekend’s NY Times Magazine is all about health – everything from the toxicity of sugar to the question of whether cell phones cause cancer. One article that caught our eye (at least after a cup of morning coffee) asks “How little sleep can you get away with?”

David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania has asked just this question, and the answer is: you should really try to get 8 hours. Dinges’ 2003 study assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. The study used a measure called psychomotor vigilance task, or PVT. PVT is a “tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic.”

The results?

Those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day.

The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.

These results are particularly interesting in light of a study recently published in the journal SLEEP that indicated that loss of an hour of sleep per night among children with ADHD had a significant impact on their ability to remain focused and sustain attention From a Science Daily article summarizing the research: “The study suggests that even moderate reductions in sleep duration can affect neurobehavioral functioning, which may have a negative impact on the academic performance of children with ADHD.”

Results of multivariate analyses of variance show that after mean nightly sleep loss of about 55 minutes for six nights, the performance of children with ADHD on a neurobehavioral test deteriorated from the subclinical range to the clinical range of inattention on four of six measures, including omission errors (missed targets) and reaction time. Children with ADHD generally committed more omission errors than controls. Although the performance of children in the control group also deteriorated after mean nightly sleep loss of 34 minutes for six nights, it did not reach a clinical level of inattention on any of the six measures.

Reut Gruber, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill University and director of the Attention, Behavior and Sleep Laboratory at Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, Québec, quoted in the Science Daily article, has advice for parents:

“The reduction in sleep duration in our study was modest and similar to the sleep deprivation that might occur in daily life,” Gruber said. “Thus, even small changes in dinner time, computer time, or staying up to do homework could result in poorer neurobehavioral functioning the following day and affect sustained attention and vigilance, which are essential for optimal academic performance.”

…

“An important implication of the present study is that investments in programs that aim to decrease sleep deprivation may lead to improvements in neurobehavioral functioning and academic performance,” she said.

I don’t know about you, but we’re going to go take a nap.

High creativity in adults with ADHD

Research conducted at the University of Michigan and Eckerd College, and published in the current issue of Personality and Individual Differences suggests that adults with ADHD are more creative than their non-attention-impaired peers. The research also indicates that adults with ADHD are “ideators” (they like to generate ideas), while non-ADHD adults tend to be “clarifiers” (who prefer to define and structure problems) and “developers” (who who elaborate or refine ideas and solutions).

We frequently think about ADHD as a disability, and it can have crippling effects on students’ ability to focus in a classroom setting and to adjust academically and socially. However, as study co-author and associate professor at the University of Michigan Priti Shah says (quoted in a Science Daily article summarizing the research): “Individuals who are not succeeding as well academically may benefit from understanding that there may be tradeoffs associated with ADHD. With extra motivation to overcome difficulties in planning, attention, and impulsivity, they may be able to take greater advantage of their creative strengths.”

Learning to Read vs. Reading to Learn

Around 2nd or 3rd grade, students begin the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. In the process, they open their minds to a flood of critical information across disciplines. And to incorporate this new knowledge, students must have mastered the basics of reading and achieved automaticity.

At Scientific Learning’s Science of Learning blog, Terri Zezula addresses the criticality of automaticity for students to begin the transition to reading to learn:

In achieving automaticity, we free our brains – our working memories – from the details of the task, allowing us to use that brain power to do more, building on those sets of automatic skills. For our students, achieving automaticity  in reading is essential not only to their becoming effective readers, but becoming effective all-around learners. The majority of students make the shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” around second or third grade. At this stage, their reading skills have developed to a point of automaticity where they no longer need to use their working memory to facilitate the task of reading, and they can use that memory for things like interpretation, comprehension and creative thinking.

On the other hand, continues Zezula:

Imagine what learning becomes for the struggling student who does not develop this automaticity alongside his or her fellow students. As others begin to learn more and more from their reading, the struggling reader must engage their working memory in the challenge of getting through the letters and words of each sentence as opposed to using that valuable memory to glean meanings and assimilate information. As their reading skills lag, their overall ability to learn suffers.

A previous post here at Thoughts from Be Amazing Learning addressed the same phenomemon:

We hear from parents a lot that their child does just fine with the mechanics of reading (decoding, spelling, etc.), but struggles with comprehension. Reading comprehension is a difficult task, as it represents the synthesis of so many language and literacy skills, from phonemic awareness to sequencing and working memory. As such, it takes time and a lot of practice to develop reading comprehension skills.

It’s important to note, however, that while kids may be struggling with comprehension, the root cause of their struggle may be more foundational in nature. For example, a child may decode well, but if his brain is working overtime on decoding, there may just not be anything left when it comes time to comprehend what he’s just read. Comprehension requires things like a working memory that’s developed enough to remember the beginning of a sentence when you get to the end. Or the first sentence of a paragraph when you get to the last. But if we can get a child’s brain to process more efficiently, the mechanics of reading become easier, which frees up energy for more complex tasks like comprehension.

The good news is that we can help kids’ brains process more efficiently. Just like we exercise our bodies in the gym or on the track to build physical fitness, we can build brain fitness through targeted exercises that adapt to our abilities. If you have a child struggling with reading comprehension or other learning challenges, visit our Web site at http://www.beamazinglearning.com or call (800) 792-4809 to learn how developing foundational cognitive skills can help your child successfully make the transition to reading to learn.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard

If you want to learn, scientists say, put pen to paper.

A recent article in Business Week cited research in France and Norway, which concluded that “writing by hand is actually a very different sensory experience than typing on a keyboard, with each activating distinctly different parts of the brain.”

Study co-author, associate professor Anne Mangen from the University of Stavangers Reading Centre in Stavanger, Norway, says:

Tests reveal that the act of handwriting — literally the feeling of touching a pen to paper — appears to imprint a “motor memory” in the sensorimotor region of the brain. In turn, this process promotes the visual recognition of letters and words, suggesting that the two seemingly separate acts of reading and writing are, in fact, linked.

In the study, participants were taught a new alphabet. Those who studied by writing out the letters by hand learned significantly more than those who studied only on a computer. Additionally, “brain scans revealed that while learning by handwriting prompted activity in a particular part of the brain known as Broca’s area, learning by keyboarding prompted little or no such activity.” Broca’s area is the portion of the brain most associated with speech production.

If you’re interested in more research-based study tips, check out these previous posts from our blog:

• Study skills are the Talk of the Nation
• Changing education paradigms
• Want to learn? Forget what you know!

Hat tip to Posit Science for the link to the Business Week article.

Coach helps with ADHD

CNN’s Health Minute feature recently highlighted the use of a life coach by a college student with ADHD:

A little different from our approach, which focuses on the foundational cognitive skills that underlie attention (and other learning) challenges. But clearly helpful as a scaffold to keep this student on track.

Who’s a good dog?

We cover some serious topics on this blog. This is not one.

The cover story of today’s NY Times Science section is about a border collie trained by psychologist John Pilley to recognize over 1000 words. Pilley’s findings were published in the journal Behavioral Processes.

Pilley trained Chaser, the border collie, 1022 words through brute force: one or two new nouns per day, driven home with repetition (up to 40 times), and reinforcement of nouns the dog forgot.

The article makes the claim that Pilley’s experiment may help explain how children learn language. Specifically, Dr. Pilley concludes that “Chaser acquired referential understanding of nouns, an ability normally attributed to children.” Referential understanding refers to the ability to identify a reference to an object (such as a photo).

But there’s some reason to be skeptical. First, as the article points out, Chaser’s task was more challenging because she lacked any context for the nouns that can make them easier to remember (for example, “knives, forks and spoons are found together”). Additionally, children don’t generally learn new words through brute repetition. And, Chaser learned all of her words as “proper nouns, which are specific labels for things, rather than as abstract concepts like the common nouns picked up by children.”

If you’d like to learn more, Chaser will be featured in a Nova episode about animal intelligence on February 9th.

Simon Says “Pay Attention!”

Play is emerging as a theme in this week’s posts. Today, we look at games that can improve children’s attention skills and reduce impulsivity.

At her Parent Smart blog, Dr. Martha Burns, a Speech-Language Pathologist and Adjunct Associate Professor at Northwestern University, highlights Simon Says… and Clap When I Say… as games that can develop impulse control. What is impulse control and why is it important? According to Burns:

An example of impulsivity in a classroom might be yelling out questions , comments or answers  instead of raising one’s hand, or popping up from a desk at inappropriate times, or even looking a someone else’s paper during a test. Impulsivity on the playground might include chasing a ball into the street without checking for cars or hitting someone who accidently bumps into you.

Learning to control these impulses, says Burns, “requires us to stay alert and purposeful and it is a skill all of us must master to reduce impulsivity; so that we stop and think before we act.”

Check out Burns’ post for details on these games that can help your child “play attention!”

The effect of mood on insight

We’re suckers for a scientific study that involves watching a Robin Williams standup routine…

Consider the task of listening to a conversation in a noisy room or concentrating on a particularly challenging puzzle. Research shows that these tasks are typically associated with activation of the anterior cingulate cortex in the brain. Cells in this area are active when we narrow our attention to concentrate on a difficult task.

But what about insight – that ability to quickly “see” the solution to a puzzle or problem (think “AHA!”), rather than solve it by brute force? Insight requires a widening of associations, rather than a narrowing. For insight to occur, the brain must be open to looser associations and connections. We must, as the scientists would say, be in a “diffuse attentional state.”

So how do we get there? The New York Times summarizes research that indicates mood is a significant factor, and that humor (here’s where the Robin Williams part comes in) is important:

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.

So next time you’re stuck on a problem, should you just remember the funny joke you heard last week?

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”

The Times Web site has a pretty cool interactive experiment that you can use to test the effect of mood on your own insight. Check it out here.