When researchers compared high IQ and average test subjects in a learning paradigm, the results were surprising. In some areas high IQ individuals work less, as might be expected by the idea that higher IQ people have more efficient brains for learning tasks, but in other areas, high IQ brains were working harder. When were high IQ brains working harder? Not prior or during the task, it seems, but when feedback was given and individuals were learning from their mistakes. From Graham et al. : “the Average IQ group failed to produce as much activation during feedback evaluation as did the High IQ group. These group differences are inconsistent with the neural efficiency hypothesis and instead suggest that the High IQ individuals were engaged in […]
How Dyslexia Changes at Different Ages [Premium]
With all of the advances in our understanding of early intervention, dyslexia in older students and young adults often gets short shrift. The paper by Dr. Kathleen Niesen and colleagues has some interesting findings that have important points for identification, accommodations, and understanding of both the challenges and strengths of adolescents and young adults with dyslexia. Importantly, the authors made this point: “…if dyslexia was not diagnosed earlier in schooling, young adults do not qualify for accommodations even if as adolescents and adults they meet research criteria for dyslexia on evidence-based assessment. Such assessment practices do not seem fair or sensible or consistent with the spirit of the Americas for Disabilities legislation.” The point made was that dyslexia missed in the early grades usually meant dyslexia […]
Dyslexic Advantage Premium OCT 2018 Working Memory Issue [Premium]
Issue articles: Forgetful geniuses, working memory and reading, hacks for work, science teaching and working memory, working memory, intelligence, and creativity, Math teaching with working memory in mind, and working memory & Bilingual students Bookmark Please login to bookmark ClosePlease login to access.
[PREMIUM] Forgetting Can Make You Smarter
In a viral video shared on our Facebook feed, Truth Theory shared the gist of a recent research report in the prestigious journal Neuron. There may be good reason why researchers’ new understanding of memory might make sense for many dyslexic people and why it may explain the perplexing memory challenges that many dyslexic students experience in school although their ability to grasp the deeper concepts and patterns may put them way ahead of classmates. From Science Daily, “two University of Toronto researchers propose that the goal of memory is not to transmit the most accurate information over time, but to guide and optimize intelligent decision making by only holding on to valuable information.” “It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses […]
Additional Resources from Premium Issue 26 [Premium]
Additional Premium Resources February 2018 Issue 26. You must be logged into your account to access: False Memories, Verbatim vs. Gist Recall, Persistence and Transcience of Memory, and Visual Perceptual and Handwriting Skills of Student with Dyspraxia (DCD). False memory for orthographically vs semantically similar words in adolescents with dyslexia. Verbatim and Gist Recall of Sentences by Dyslexia and Non-Dyslexic Adults The Persistence and Transience of Memory Visual perceptual and Handwriting Skills in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder Bookmark Please login to bookmark ClosePlease login to access.
SCIENCE: THE BALANCING ACT OF LITERACY
Dr. Stanislaus Dehaene is a French researcher who has authored Reading and the Brain. He and his research team conducted some interesting investigations into Portuguese and Brazilian adults who they classified into 3 groups: unschooled adults (referred to as...
DROPPING OUT BECAUSE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE [Premium]
At Harvard University in the 1970s, a clinical psychologist made a startling discovery. Intending to study the emotional problems that caused students at one of the world’s elite universities to drop out of school to drop out, he found out instead that the most common reason students dropped out of their degree programs was that they were unable to satisfy Harvard’s foreign language requirement. “Dinklage described three groups of students who were otherwise, bright, gifted, and highly motivated, but who remained unsuccessful in the foreign language classroom. He reported that these students were not helped by merely improving study habits or by adjusting to postsecondary demands.” The 1st group of students demonstrated problems in written language that were most apparent in “the student’s reading […]
ACTING WITH DYSLEXIA [Premium]
There are some dyslexic children who seem to be natural actors and actresses at early ages and their talent and imitating the gestures, voices, and personalities of others seems almost from birth. What are the strengths and talents that make so many dyslexic people talented actresses and actors? For some it may be emotional empathy, others, an ability to visualize events and personal interactions cinematically, and still others, a love of ‘getting into the heads’ of so many characters. Some drama schools report as many as 30% of their students are dyslexic, so dyslexia seems to be over-represented in these school compared to the general population. Some researchers have observed that as a group, dyslexics are more likely to visualize events upon reading text than […]
Latest Research: Repetition As a Poor Way to Teach Dyslexics [Premium]
In groundbreaking research, researchers at MIT or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that dyslexic children and adults have “a diminished ability to acclimate to a repeated input in their paper titled “Dysfunction of Rapid Neural Adaption in Dyslexia.” Like many research papers, dyslexia is seen through a negative lens (‘dysfunction’) and the take-home points through university press releases, similarly so, however the findings are interesting ones and fit with an evolving picture of dyslexia as a learning difference (rather than disease or disability) that extends beyond reading and has ramifications for many aspects of education. “It’s a difference in the brain that’s not about reading per se, but it’s a difference in perceptual learning that’s pretty broad,” says John Gabrieli, who is the study’s […]
[PREMIUM] Latest Research: Dyslexia, Sequential Memory, and Seeing the Big Picture
“My mind doesn’t work like a train track. It’s more like a web page with lots of hyperlinks.” – dyslexic honors college student. It’s refreshing to see that more researchers take an interest on dyslexia beyond reading. In this recent paper from Belgium and Missouri, the challenges of remembering sequential information for dyslexics and non-dyslexics was reviewed. Both working memory and sequencing were examined. Working memory is a type of short-term memory necessary for keeping information ‘in mind.’ Sequencing is remembering the order that things are said. It’s activities such as this that that can make something like following classroom instructions or remembering computer passwords easy or hard. Several interesting observations were made from their review of the research literature: – Dyslexic children and adults tend […]
[PREMIUM] Tips from a Dyslexic World Memory Champion
When people say they would like to ‘brain train’ or get smarter for school, they often mean they want to make their brains more efficient – so they learn more, but also work less. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to boost memory – and for most dyslexic people, the way you train may be more important than how hard or how much. We talk about memory trade-offs a bit in our book, The Dyslexic Advantage, but briefly, in general, dyslexic people of all ages tend to show a preference for personally-experienced memories rather than dry facts that need to be memorized by rote. A trick for memorizing more efficiently is to take the dry stuff and transform it into something […]
The Fight over Rote Math
If you think you've been hearing conflicting information about rote math in the news or from schools, you're absolutely right. The fight is spilling over to educational policymakers and makers of standardized tests such as the College Board. For dyslexic and...
