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Q & A: School Psychologist Asks: How Do I Identify Dyslexia? [Premium]

A School Psychologist asks… Q: How Do I Identify Dyslexia? You may be surprised to learn that psychologists may not know how to identify dyslexia in the school setting. You may be even more surprised to learn that a NASP consensus statement recommended school psychologists avoid the term “dyslexia” all together. Thankfully, not all school psychologists agree with this statement or practice and perhaps since the Secretary of Education said there was no reason not to “Say Dyslexia”, the consensus may change. One insightful school psychologist blog offered this warning citing the NASP report: Warning! Bad Thinking Ahead. Excerpt: “There are several problems with that advice, not the least of which being that it flies in the face of various state legislative and education department initiatives.  First and foremost, […]

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Dyslexia and IQ: What You Must Know [Premium]

Here are 4 of the Most Important Things You Should Know About Dyslexia & IQ: #1. It Can Be Used to Identify Strengths and Talents.  In our minds, one of the best reasons that dyslexic students benefit by IQ testing is that it can quickly establish their intelligence and strengths. There are many strengths that aren’t measured by IQ testing, of course, but also many that it can find – and it provides an objective standard with schools and other institutions wil accept. For dyslexic students in particular, it tends to trump traditional ‘achievement’ assessments because the best tests are given one-on-one (we do not like group IQ tests) and tests of higher order thinking are for the most part untimed (the verbal tests) involve […]

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Can Gifted Kids with Dyslexia Fly at School? – When Tests and Schools Fall Short [Premium]

I recently came across Bobby Gilman’s article on the critical issues facing twice-exceptional or Gifted LD students at school. It’s an ambitious paper for sure, but provides a solid big picture view of the challenges that 2E students face in their pursuit of an appropriate education. The challenges include states drastically scaling back services for students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLDs) of which dyslexia is considered a part. Sometimes the issue is that the threshold for students to qualify for services is so prohibitively low (e.g. 5 or 12th percentile), that many students are missed and fall off any radar. Regarding Response to Intervention or RTI: Gilman et al. states: “RTI was not developed with gifted children in mind, and adaptation of its rules for gifted children […]

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Dyslexia, Storyboarding, and Film Director Martin Scorsese [Premium]

“That’s the way it is with art. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice.” – Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese is an Academy award winning American director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and film historian with over 50 years in the movie industry, and he is dyslexic. He grew up in a New York tenement, an asthmatic child of a presser and seamstress in the Lower East Side. He recalls spending lots of time in front of a TV set watching good and bad films and going to a local movie theatre with his father and brother. As he watched, he often drew his own scenes, frame by frame in a notebook, flicking pages back and forth […]

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Dyslexia and Multisensory Learning [Premium]

“I myself am a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall have any distinctness at all. – William James “Father of Psychology   Most dyslexia experts know that multisensory structured language instruction is the gold standard for teaching students with dyslexia, but most people don’t know exactly why. Many attribute the concept to Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, but actually the idea was recognized at least 30 years earlier by William James and Francis Galton, both of whom may have been dyslexic. From James’ classic book, The Principles […]

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Latest Research – Your Brain on Audiobooks [Premium]

 This is pretty cool research. When we listen to stories, we maybe transported to a different place and time, living in the heads of characters, and immersing ourselves in another world. What does that look like in our brains? We have a clearer answer now from brain researchers in the Netherlands, and besides seeing how different areas “light up” or don’t, it now appears that there are often strong individual preferences among individuals as to whether they are “mentalizers” or “sensory-motor” listeners. In this research paper, mentalizers were defined as those who preferentially active ‘Theory of Mind’ areas associated with thinking about other peoples’ thoughts and beliefs, whereas motor listeners were most reactive to action descriptions. From previous studies, researchers learned that if you read the work […]

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Are Standardized Tests Making Kids Anxious? [Premium]

Florida Department of Education just released results of their Florida Standards Assessment  or FSA Test. 46% of all of the public school children who took the test were below standard and 20% are at risk for being held back in the 3rd grade. What are these tests that can force 3rd graders to repeat a year? A sample 3rd grade reading passage (with questions and answers) is provided by the Department. The passage was clearly developmentally appropriate for 3rd graders – and ridiculous for dyslexic 3rd graders who are likely to make up 15% of every classroom. But don’t take just our word for it. When we put the 3rd grade FSA practice reading passage through a readability tool, What was the passage appropriate for? […]

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New Research: Brain Scans Predict Cognitive Performance [Premium]

“This suggests that individual differences in many cognitive tasks are a stable trait marker.”   There’s a new Oxford research study circulating through scientific communities and around the world. From Science (Task-free MRI predicts individual differences in brain activity during task performance), Tavor and collegues applied machine-learning principles to test subjects in a “resting state” to see how they could predict their performances on various cognitive tasks. What was the result? They could predict subject’s responses in 46 out of 47 tasks (and maybe there’s a reason why the 47th one didn’t work…it involved more subcortical activity). Tasks included responses to mental math, sentence and story processing, but also higher order problem solving, social perception, and working memory. The data have a lot of ramifications in […]

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Why Students Hate to Write – A High School Teacher’s Reflections [Premium]

 “When students say that they do not like to write I ask them why. They typically respond with, “Because I hate it” … after incidents like this I cannot help but sit back and ask myself why I think they do not like to write…” One young teacher of high school students put her own assumptions to the test and her teaching has changed forever. Students with dyslexia often hate to write because there is such a huge gulf between the ideas in their heads and what they can get down on paper. At a recent talk to some student teachers, I asked the room what they thought they could do for a high school student who was very slow and having trouble getting their […]

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Discoverer of the Titanic – Dyslexic Ocean Explorer Robert Ballard [Premium]

“When I was a child, I wrote a letter to an oceanographic institution in California called Scripps (Scripps Institution of Oceanography UC San Diego). It was a Dear Santa Claus letter. “Dear Scripps, I want to be an oceanographer.” I’m sure I misspelled it, because I’m dyslexic. They gave me a scholarship.” – Robert Ballard When I was seventeen, 56 years ago, I went on my first expedition. We got caught in a storm, hit by a rogue wave, and I thought that was so cool. I was too young to be afraid. I just fell in love with adventure with a purpose, where you go out there and overcome the obstacles that you’re always faced with, and then you find this secret, whether it’s a shipwreck […]

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Dyslexia in the General Classroom – YOU DECIDE : 2nd Grader and Reading [Premium]

YOU are a 2nd-grade teacher in a busy public school classroom. You just learned that Teddy, a student in your class has been tested and found to be dyslexic.  Teddy already gets pull-out instruction with multisensory learning to help him read. What can you do to help Teddy make more progress in reading? ************     1. Alliteration,  Rhyming, and Singing – All students can benefit by alliteration and rhyming. New readers will find the books easier to read and reinforcing in terms of the patterns of sounds and printed word families, but good readers can also use alliteration and rhyming as a prompt for poetry and humorous writing. Here is a nice graphic organizer for alliteration:  (click here for more). This teacher created alliteration spinners to […]

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This is Your Brain on Words [Premium]

In breaking research from UC Berkeley, researchers have found a complicated filing system when it comes to how we process words that we hear. While listening to stories, individual words triggered tiny activation explosions all over the brain associated with word associations – “Words were grouped under various headings: visual, tactile, numeric, locational, abstract, temporal, professional, violent, communal, mental, emotional and social.” So a well-working human brain responding to stories functions more like a wall filled with stickie notes rather than a linear filing cabinet?  Which sounds more like the dyslexic way of wiring?  Check out the video explanation below. The finding certainly points out the fallacy of viewing language in simple right-brain-left brain terms, but it does support the complexity of language and the right-left […]

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