It’s a question that arises commonly – does spellchecking for students help or hinder when it comes to students and spelling? The concern is that allowing students to use spellcheck on a regular basis in the long run may prevent them learning correct spellings. Should age matter or the presence of dyslexia? What about working memory overload or ADD/ ADHD? The issue is not a trivial one especially because of recent efforts to The issue is not a trivial one especially because of recent efforts to put laptops away in college during lectures based on computer-based vs. traditional note-taking by hand (N.B. this study did not specifically assess dyslexic students – see the NPR story also below). A recent paper by Hiscox and colleagues (see below) […]
[Premium] Sorting Out the Differences Between Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD
On one level, Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD would seem quite different, but in reality, we are only at the beginning of our understanding of how the two might overlap and be different. Both Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD were initially characterized by their negatives – Dyslexia by difficulty learning to read, and ADD / ADHD by difficulty paying attention. Today we know that for both, positive qualities like higher levels of creativity and ability can be associated as well as negatives, and researchers are only now beginning to take a more careful look at what these two designations imply. For those who don’t know, as a group, children with ADD / ADHD score lower on many tests of phonology and reading comprehension, theoretically because of their […]
Critical Review of the Use of Strattera on Healthy Children with Dyslexia
In a controversial paper, Dr. Sally Shaywitz and colleagues at the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity and the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Company have authored a paper that examines the effect of the norephinephrine uptake inhibitor Atomoxetine (Strattera) on...
Q & A: Can Someone Be Both Dyslexic and Autistic ? [Premium]
QUESTION: Is it Possible to Have Both Dyslexia and Autism? The short answer is yes, but it’s likely not very common and in general many of the features of dyslexia and autism are opposite. By strict criteria, low IQ and autism are excluded from the diagnosis of dyslexia. However, it is not difficult to speculate that a child with family dyslexia could also have autism either through inheritance or through some environmental factor. The main thing to consider is that it may be much more common that a child with dyslexia has social factors unrelated to autism or a child with autism has reading and writing problems unrelated to dyslexia. In fact, typically dyslexic and autistic children have different cognitive, memory, and perceptual patterns although they […]
ADHD / Gifted 2E Guidelines from Department of Education – Schools
In breaking news, the US Department of Education and Office for Civil Rights have released their a letter from Asst Secretary Catherine Lhamon and its Students with ADHD and Section 504 Resource Guide HERE. For your convenience, we also include them below -...
Latest Research: Advances in our Understanding of Dyslexia, ADHD, and Giftedness [Premium]
It’s long been known that Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD have high rates of overlaps or “co-morbidities”. Dyslexia and ADHD co-occur 30-50% of the time (Germano, 2010) and only 40% of children with dyslexia and 20% of children with ADD/ADHD have it in isolation (Wilcutt and Pennington, 2000). Science has progressed on many fronts over the past 5 years, and both attention and dyslexia are now known to be much more complex than originally suspected. It has long been known that dyslexia is associated with attention and working memory differences, and that reading, writing, and spelling difficulties are higher among children identified as having ADHD. Both Dyslexia and ADD / ADHD are associated with slower processing speeds and both seem to be connected with the […]