I Speak of Dreams

Research Initiative by the International Dyslexia Association Needs Your Support

cross posted at Academic Remediation

 This should be exciting news for anyone interested in reading acquisition, school success --even the achievement gap.

There are two needs here:

1. Additional sources of funding
2. Researchers with a background of evaluating reading instruction

The International Dyslexia Association will be awarding multiple $20,000 grants to evaluate the effectiveness of multi-sensory, structured, language instruction (MSL). While MSL has had decades of success, there has been very little replicated research to point to. 

Everyday Health on ADHD Issues: Seeking Reader Feedback

In 2010 Everyday Health published  in-depth group interviews with a panel of 23 ADHD doctors and coaches.   These experts covered twenty of the most pressing ADHD issues related to children,  including diagnosis and treatment, medication, and behavior.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/adhd/expert-answers-on-adhd.aspx

 

ADHD, Part One: Exploring Causes and Treatment

ADHD, Part One: Exploring Causes and Treatment adhd experts causes and treatments Nearly one in 10 kids is diagnosed with ADHD — so it's not surprising that parents, medical professionals, and educators alike are debating these rising rates. From potential causes to non-drug treatment strategies, experts tackle some of the hot-button issues surrounding ADHD today.

• Why are so many more kids being diagnosed with ADHD?
• What are the causes of ADHD?
• How do you explain the value of ADHD treatment to resistant parents?
• How can school systems help ADHD kids?
• Which non-drug strategies work best?
• Can lax parenting cause ADHD?
• Does TV and video games cause ADHD?
• What role does diet play?

ADHD, Part 2: Diagnosing, Medicating, and More

Medicating kids for ADHD is a controversial topic among medical professionals and parents. Naysayers believe that children today are simply overdiagnosed and overmedicated, while advocates endorse these meds as a child's best chance at normalcy. Get the facts from our ADHD experts:

• How Is ADHD diagnosed?
• Is ADHD even a real disorder?
• If a child has ADHD, should parents be evaluated too?
• What is ADHD without the hyperactivity?
• Are ADHD meds overprescribed?
• Are ADHD drugs safe for children?
• What are the most common side effects?
• What are the long-term side effects?
• How fast does ADHD medication work?
• How young is too young for medication?
• Can ADHD drugs stunt a child’s growth?
• Are "drug holidays" a good idea?

The ADHD specialists interviewed:

Linda Aber
L. Eugene Arnold, MD, MEd
Frank Barnhill, MD
Eric Beam, PhD
Monte W. Davenport, PhD
Robert F. De Maria, DC, NHD
Lawrence Diller, MD
Jacquelyn F. Gamino, PhD
Kim Kendall, PhD
Erin N. King
Barry Lessin, MEd
Will Meek, PhD
Charles Parker, DO
Rhonda Pawlan, MS
David Pomeroy, MD
Patricia O. Quinn, MD
Steven Richfield, PsyD
Stephanie Sarkis, PhD
Rory Stern, PsyD
Jodi Sleeper-Triplett
Ari Tuckman, PsyD, MBA
F. Allen Walker, MD
Lara Honos-Webb, PhD

 Now Everyday Health is seeking reader response.  You can leave a comment here or respond directly to

[email protected]

via e-mail

 

Facts, values, and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): an update on the controversies

Note: What follows is the abstract. The whole article is available on-line. This is an important piece for parents and older children to read. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health | Full text | Facts, values, and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): an update on the controversies.

The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, is holding a series of 5 workshops to examine the controversies surrounding the use of medication to treat emotional and behavioral disturbances in children. These workshops bring together clinicians, researchers, scholars, and advocates with diverse perspectives and from diverse fields. Our first commentary in CAPMH, which grew out of our first workshop, explained our method and explored the controversies in general. This commentary, which grows out of our second workshop, explains why informed people can disagree about ADHD diagnosis and treatment. Based on what workshop participants said and our understanding of the literature, we make 8 points.

1. The ADHD label is based on the interpretation of a heterogeneous set of symptoms that cause impairment.
2. Because symptoms and impairments are dimensional, there is an inevitable "zone of ambiguity," which reasonable people will interpret differently.
3. Many other variables, from different systems and tools of diagnosis to different parenting styles and expectations, also help explain why behaviors associated with ADHD can be interpreted differently.
4.  Because people hold competing views about the proper goals of psychiatry and parenting, some people will be more, and others less, concerned about treating children in the zone of ambiguity.
5. To recognize that nature has written no bright line between impaired and unimpaired children, and that it is the responsibility of humans to choose who should receive a diagnosis, does not diminish the significance of ADHD.
6. Once ADHD is diagnosed, the facts surrounding the most effective treatment are complicated and incomplete; contrary to some popular wisdom, behavioral treatments, alone or in combination with low doses of medication, can be effective in the long-term reduction of core ADHD symptoms and at improving many aspects of overall functioning.
7. Especially when a child occupies the zone of ambiguity, different people will emphasize different values embedded in the pharmacological and behavioral approaches.
8. Truly informed decision-making requires that parents (and to the extent they are able, children) have some sense of the complicated and incomplete facts regarding the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD.

More on Erik Parens. More on Josephine Johnston. Understanding the agreements and controversies surrounding childhood psychopharmacology

Ken DeRosa Lambastes The Foolishness Known as Miscue Analysis

"Miscue analysis" was invented out of whole cloth by Ken Goodman and rests on the fatally-flawed "three cueing system" model of reading.   "Three cueing" and "miscue analysis" are dead giveaways that you are in the thickets of whole language and its offspring, "balanced literacy".

Patience with A Struggling Learner

From the blog Instructional Solutions: Mary.

My son could not learn addition facts even using the procedure outlined in Carnine's Direct Instruction book. After weeks and weeks, he'd finally learn four facts and then when two more were introduced he'd forget them all. Precision teaching graphing indicated that he shouldn't be working on the skill, but who is going to give up on one's own child and math basics. Seven days a week we worked on learning the facts. When he forgot the first four, we'd start all over learning those. When I'd introduce two more facts and he'd forget them all, it was starting over time. We did that several times going back to those darned ole first four facts.

Eventually, slowly but surely he began to learn the facts and the best part was that as they finally were in his long term memory, he began to learn other facts more quickly.

Links:

Direct Instruction Resources 

1. National Institute for Direct Instruction
2. Direct Instruction Research Summary
3. Martin Kozloff's Direct Instruction Site

Precision Teaching

1. Precision Teaching Hub
2. The Fluency Factory-- Precision Teaching Links

New Dyslexia-Reducing Initiative from Nemours

This looks promising. 

The Nemours Brightstart Dyslexia Initiative  (NBDI) is seeking to identify children at risk for dyslexia as early as pre-kindergarten (before the age of five), and using an intervention program developed by Nemours, determine if the intervention reduces the number of children later referred to special education.

From Inflexible Knowledge to Flexible Knowledge

This is an oldie but goodie from Daniel Willingham: Inflexible Knowledge: The First Step to Expertise AFT: Publications: American Educator: Winter 2002: Ask the Cognitive Scientist.

What Does This Suggest for Teachers?

1. Use examples: The fact that students seem to get stuck on examples does not mean that teachers should refrain from providing examples. Certainly, examples help students understand the abstract concepts and some researchers (e.g., Gick & Holyoak, 1983; Gentner et al., 1993) believe that by providing multiple examples, one encourages students to compare the examples and to thereby consider what they have in common; what they have in common, of course, is the deep structure we would like students to learn. Thus, it is probably helpful to tell them not just about Pavlov’s dog, but about a number of wide-ranging examples.

2. Make a distinction between rote and inflexible knowledge: This might be the most important point. Rote knowledge is meaningless. But inflexible knowledge is a natural consequence of learning. We should neither despair when it appears, nor take drastic measures to eliminate it when its elimination could cause collateral damage to our students (i.e., diminished factual knowledge).

 3. Appreciate the importance of students’ growing knowledge, even if it’s inflexible: Don’t be reluctant to build students’ factual knowledge base. Some facts end up in memory without any meaning, and other facts have meanings that are quite inflexible, but that doesn’t mean that teachers should minimize the teaching of facts in the curriculum. "Fact" is not synonymous with rote knowledge or with inflexible knowledge. Knowing more facts makes many cognitive functions (e.g., comprehension, problem solving) operate more efficiently. If we minimize the learning of facts out of fear that they will be absorbed as rote knowledge, we are truly throwing the baby out with the bath water.

4. Remember that inflexible knowledge is a natural step on the way to the deeper knowledge that we want our students to have: Frustration that students’ knowledge is inflexible is a bit like frustration that a child can add but can’t do long division. It’s not that this child knows nothing; rather, he doesn’t know everything we want him to know yet. But the knowledge he does have is the natural step on the road to deeper knowledge. What turns the inflexible knowledge of a beginning student into the flexible knowledge of an expert seems to be a lot more knowledge, more examples, and more practice.

Dorothy Bishop: Evaluating Alternative Solutions for Dyslexia

Link below takes you to a 36-minute talk on dyslexia, how it is remediated, and how to evaluate solutions or treatments (other than direct, explicit, multi-sensory instruction in reading). dysTalk - Talks - Evaluating Alternative Solutions For Dyslexia.

About this talk: Professor Dorothy Bishop provides an insight into what parents should look out for and what to consider when evaluating if alternative solutions for dyslexia will be effective. About the speaker: Dorothy Bishop is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford and Adjunct Professor at The University of Western Australia, Perth. She is a leading expert on dyslexia and developmental langauge disorders.

The Best Kept Secret in Special Education

SF Special Education Examiner: The best kept secret in special education.

Most college special education masters programs do not include comprehensive instruction in reading for dyslexics.

Yet, dyslexics or children with reading disorders make up 70-80% of the special education students. Is there any wonder why special education reading scores are so low?

How does this happen?

Teacher Education: Belief-Based or Science-Based?

This is from an interview between David Boulton and Keith Stanovich at Children of the Code. The whole interview is called Cognitive Science: The Conceptual Components of Reading & What Reading Does for the Mind

David Boulton: In particular, what I'm referring to is the way that we educate teachers. We don't take them into a first-person, grounded understanding of this challenge from which to become scientist-learners in their own right, in their practice of it, and they end up subscribing to belief mechanisms.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes.

David Boulton: And in that sense, it's like competing religions.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, very much so. They respond to the charismatic people they had in teacher education school and they're not given what I would call discipline-based knowledge. Actually it's not just reading I have an interest in, my other research area is critical thinking. Similar things go on there. You have teachers picking up knowledge from in-service gurus and teaching reading without a knowledge of phonology or orthography or the history of linguistic change, which I see is one of your interests, and what I would call information processing, cognitive psychology, for that matter, relevant issues and cognitive development. This is what I call the discipline-based knowledge that surrounds reading. Very little of it penetrates into reading education.

The point I make is that this is an unfortunately replicable phenomena. It happens in the area of critical thinking as well. Schools have programs they get, again, from commercial packages, in-service gurus, with no grounding in discipline-based knowledge in thinking and reasoning; and I mean discipline-based knowledge in philosophy, decision science, decision theory, cognitive science - where principles of rational thought are being studied empirically and theoretically by philosophers. None of this penetrates education. So, I think it's a recurring problem.

David Boulton: And the biggest danger that I see as I bump into what you're talking about is that teachers are trained out of being learners. There’s such a difference between belief based on somebody else's knowledge...

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right.

David Boulton: And actually having an appetite to understand something for yourself, striving into your own learning, and then having access to the kind of resources that will support your learning and keeping it going right through your practice in school with kids.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Well said. Every component of what you've listed is missing from the educational culture. I couldn't agree more.

Go read the whole essay. Then explore Children of the Code (www.childrenofthecode.org)