“When we act on sensory inputs we call it ‘attention,' but there’s a similar mechanism that can act on the thoughts we hold in mind.” — Timothy Buschman, Princeton University For the past 70 years, psychologists, researchers, teachers have focused intently on the...
Memory Problems and Math [Premium]
Many students and adults attribute difficulties in math to memory problems, but probing these difficulties further often leads to the realization that it’s not a simple matter of remembering or forgetting, but rather trouble defining, organizing, then retrieving what has been learned. PROBLEMS DEFINING AND UNDERSTANDING ‘WHY’ First of all, if a student is struggling […]
The Power of the List [Premium]
For many of us, hearing about a new technology, app, or software can result in mixed feelings. We may have hope about better organizing and simplifying our lives, but also have reasonable worry about a difficult learning curve, a complicated interface, or any number of problems that can prevent us from reaping the benefits of […]
Finding the Word: Tip of the Tongue [Premium]
What is Tip of the Tongue? It’s trouble coming up with a word for something when you know what it is. It’s common for people of any age to have occasional “tip of the tongue” moments, but it also gets more common as we age (mid 60’s and older especially) and more common […]
Preparing with Templates and Posters [Premium]
When interviewing accomplished people of all sorts who are also dyslexic, there are some recurring themes – and one is, “I learned how to do the ‘dyslexic thing,’ you know, overprepare.” In some cases that means committing more hours to something – whether it was oral presentation or final project or job rotation. […]
Managing Information with Concept Maps [Premium]
Although many people may use the terms “concept map” and “mind map” interchangeably, mind maps tend to be simpler, relating information to a central topic, whereas concept maps seek to cover more complex subjects, relating different parts to each other. Concept maps can be used to simplify material because different information can be grouped together […]
Quick or Slow Remediation? [Premium]
The learning challenges of dyslexia can be very mild or quite severe, but the severity of challenges are not the sole determination of whether remediation will be quick or slow. Once we visited an elite private school for dyslexia on the East Coast. Their aim to get students through their program in 2 years, in […]
Helping Severe Dyslexia – Part 2 Word Learning and Vocabulary [Premium]
In our previous post on Severe Dyslexia, we talked about 6 steps required to read: 1. Seeing 2. Visual Recognition of Words 3. Matching Letters and Words to Sounds – Phonemic Awareness 4. Matching Words to Word Meaning 5. Saying Words 6. Comprehending Text In that post, we talked about how different readers may have difficulty with […]
Executive Function: What Smart People Do Differently While Learning [Premium]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
STRATEGIES FOR THE MOST COMMON SPELLING MISTAKES: THE SCHWA [Premium]
Once you learn how to recognize the ‘schwa’, you’ll start recognizing them everywhere! In linguistics, the schwa sound is represented by an upside-down ‘e’ and the mouth position is a lot like the ‘uh’ sound in ‘butter’. It contributes to lots of misspellings in dyslexic students (and actually non-dyslexic students too) so recognizing the patterns […]