A new study on dyslexia, which is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, could change how educators diagnose the disorder, thereby opening up reading support to more children who could benefit from it. 

The International Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as "a neurologically based, often familial, disorder that interferes with the acquisition and processing of language." Although dyslexia is commonly thought of as a tendency to reverse letters, it is more fundamentally an inability to match the sounds of letters with the symbols that stand for them. Dyslexia varies in severity, and may involve trouble with hearing the sounds of language, reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and occasionally math. It is a lifelong impairment, but often responds to treatment, especially when help is offered early.

About 5 to 10 percent of American children are diagnosed as dyslexic, and until now, the label has been assigned to children who have more difficulty with reading, writing, and spelling skills than their IQ would suggest. This is called the "discrepancy model" because they are not performing up to the level that their thinking and reasoning abilities would predict. At the same time, reading difficulties in children with low IQs have been historically considered to be associated with their general cognitive limitations. Now, a brain-imaging study is challenging this understanding.    

MIT Professor John Gabrieli asserts that, to the contrary, "reading difficulty is independent of other cognitive abilities." Professor Gabrieli and colleagues from MIT, Stanford University, and York University in the U.K. performed a study whose findings could have an important impact on both diagnosis and education for kids who struggle to read. "We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ."

In the study, the researchers recruited 131 children, from 7 to 17 years old. According to a simple reading test and an IQ measure, each child was assigned to one of three groups: typical readers with typical IQs; poor readers with typical IQs; and poor readers with low IQs. All were shown pairs of words and asked to judge whether the words rhymed. (Rhymes are an effective way to probe dyslexics' reading performance, since dyslexia is thought to entail difficulty connecting written words to sounds.) For some pairs, the researchers used words that rhyme but don't share the same final letters-such as "bait" and "gate"- so that rhyme couldn't be inferred simply from spelling.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers observed the activity in six brain regions known to be important for reading. The results? Neural activity in the two groups of poor readers was indistinguishable. "The brain patterns could not have been more similar, whether the child had a high or low IQ," Gabrieli reported. The fMRI taken of children with dyslexia with the low IQs had the same patterns of brain circuitry abnormalities as those of the children with dyslexia with normal IQs. Both groups had less activity in the two left hemisphere brain regions that are often less active in dyslexics.

The MRI scans of both an ordinary reader and dyslexic reader can be seen below: 

Ordinary readers use the left temporal area for sounding out words Left Temporal Region is less active in dyslexics than in typical readers

These results suggest that the reading problems of the lower IQ children are independent of their lower IQs and instead are related to brain circuitry abnormalities similar to those of normal IQ dyslexics. In other words, it is the same underlying neural mechanism that is responsible, regardless of general cognitive ability.

How will this affect children and testing in schools? Currently many public school systems require that a child have an otherwise normal IQ score to receive a diagnosis of dyslexia, but the new study suggests that even children with low IQ scores might benefit from treatment specific to dyslexia. Gabrieli says he hopes the new results will encourage educators to offer reading support to more struggling students, and he stresses the importance of diagnosing dyslexia and other behavioral disorders sooner rather than later. "Now, you basically diagnose dyslexia when a child seems miserable in school," he says. "Maybe you could intervene before they ever get that way."

If you know a dyslexic child or adult who needs help learning to read or write, A+ offers one-to-one instruction using The Wilson Reading System.  Based on Orton-Gillingham principles, WRS is a highly-structured remedial program that directly teaches the structure of the language to students and adults who have been unable to learn with other teaching strategies or who may require multisensory language instruction. Call us at 215.886.9188 to learn more. 

In four cleverly designed experiments reported in Science Magazine (August 2011), scientists explored how the Internet may be changing the way people remember information. The psychologists, led by assistant professor Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University, wanted to determine whether people were more or less likely to remember information if they knew that it could be easily retrieved from a computer.

The Internet's sophisticated search engines and online databases have made accessing information as easy as typing in a few words and pressing "Enter." No longer do we have to go to the library and dig through encyclopedias or call our friend to remember the title of a movie from years ago. Now, we can "Google" anything that comes to mind, and the results of these studies show that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of that information. Ironically, people have enhanced abilities of recall for where to access it, the most surprising result. Essentially, the researchers concluded that search engines have actually started to reshape our brains, making the "where" more important than the "what."

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard University and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia into a computer; half of the subjects believed the information would be saved and the other half believed that it would be erased. If they thought they would not be able to find it later, the subjects were significantly more likely to remember information. "Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read," the authors reported.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder than the actual information.

The results confirmed a growing belief that people use the Internet as an always-accessible external memory source, similar to the situation where we rely on our family, friends and co-workers to store information for us, something known as transactive memory. The Internet's effects on memory are still largely unexplored, Dr. Sparrow said, adding that her experiments led her to conclude that the Internet has become our primary external storage system. "Human memory," she said, "is adapting to new communications technology." In Dr. Sparrow's view at least, this development is not a bad one: "Perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding."

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Video Games in the Classroom?

Is there a place for Minecraft or SimCity in a classroom? Do we want our already electronically-dependent kids to play video games as school work? Proponents say that games can be used to show how systems interact, to teach physics, to build problem-solving skills, and to explore themes as diverse as political systems, war, and peace. The complex nature of today's games actually makes them social activities, some argue, because players talk about the challenges within the game and must collaborate to solve them.

Opponents argue that games are a distraction with little learning value, and that they detract from social classroom interactions such as raising hands, taking turns to answer questions, having conversations, and being respectful of other students and the teacher.

One second-grade teacher at a private school in New York City had such qualms until he introduced Minecraft, a computer game where players construct and maintain an imaginary world, into his lessons. The teacher, Joel Levin, removed content not suitable for second graders and assigned specific tasks--such as building houses or solving challenges--for students to complete and then included lessons about Internet safety, teamwork, and conflict resolution. He was incredibly pleased with the results. "Games are where these kids are living," Levin says. "If you can drive these lessons home within the context of a game they really enjoy...I feel like I'm reaching these kids in ways I never was able to before."

Mr. Levin then took Minecraft to high school students by starting an after-school group. At first, he observed chaos, but after a few weeks, students held elections to select leaders, divided into teams, and worked together to navigate their universe. Charles Yoshimura, one of the seniors in the group, commented that being elected as a leader has taught him the importance of societal structure, and in addition, he has recognized and developed personality traits such as leadership.

Even so, parent groups have long advocated limiting the amount of time children spend watching TV and playing video games. They believe that there are better ways to learn. In our increasingly digital world, it seems that we will be having this discussion more and more frequently, either in person or virtually!