Math: Multiple Representations [Premium]

Math: Multiple Representations [Premium]

If you have a lot of ground to cover for the coming school year, consider the use of multiple representations to improve the efficiency of learning.     First, as a person who is math-challenged herself and was tasked at one time with tutoring one of our kids with similar math difficulties, I am sympathetic to people who are tasked with teaching math. The truth is, I wasn’t good at it myself, so I found myself getting frustrated when my student didn’t understand. I had little flexibility between math representations – and as a result tended to teach math the way I was taught it…rote memory of sequenced steps – which I was to find was the last thing my student should have been trying […]

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Foreign Language Learning [Premium]

Foreign Language Learning [Premium]

Q: HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY FLUENCY WITH A SECOND LANGUAGE?     Recently, a member of this community asked about how to improve his fluency with a foreign language. He mentioned that he’d been trying to learn for the past 30 years, but only recently started making more progress with the app Yabla because it was visual and didn’t rely on audio alone. Yabla is an interactive video approach to foreign language learning that provides two channels of captions that can be shown or hidden and TV shows, music videos, documentaries, and interviews. A: I can see how Yabla can help with improving speed of listening. The videos provide context and the scenes may make the dialogues more memorable than if they were read […]

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Supporting Young Dyslexics during the Pandemic

Supporting Young Dyslexics during the Pandemic

With all the continued upheaval due the pandemic, here's some advice for trying to keep the big picture of the coming school year. DYSLEXIC DEVELOPMENT HAS ITS OWN TIME TABLE There can be a very late bloom for a lot of the younger years for dyslexics - so don't...

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What Kind of Dysgraphia [Premium]

What Kind of Dysgraphia [Premium]

A recent clinical review of dysgraphia has defined dysgraphia in the following way: “At its broadest definition, dysgraphia is a disorder of writing ability at any stage, including problems with letter formation/legibility, letter spacing, spelling, fine motor coordination, rate of writing, grammar, and composition.”   Developmental dysgraphia (i.e. dysgraphia not based on some known injury) is described in the same article as having a “difficulty in acquiring writing skills despite sufficient learning opportunity and cognitive potential.” When a teacher or other professional asks a parent about “what type of dysgraphia their student might have,” they may be referring to the so-called “5 Types of Dysgraphia”, that often include, “motor”, “dyslexic”, “spatial”, and so on – but these distinctions are rarely clear-cut in real life and […]

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Helping With Homework If You’re Not A Wiz Yourself [Premium]

Helping With Homework If You’re Not A Wiz Yourself [Premium]

These are strange times and even if you’re not accustomed to helping with homework (including different types of homework), it may help a lot if you can help. Even pre-pandemic, when parents were surveyed about their helping with homework and trouble lending help, about 50% said they had difficulty… so you’re not alone. There are healthy debates about whether you as a parent should help with homework…and that doesn’t even consider whether a child might be dyslexic, dysgraphic, or dyscalculic, or all three. Helping with homework is not a good idea if the student doesn’t learn how to do the work. Now if a student is drowning, and no one is around to help, then a little help might not seem to be a terrible […]

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Answer Apps and the Benefits of Learning in Reverse [Premium]

Answer Apps and the Benefits of Learning in Reverse [Premium]

Conventional lecture courses for subjects with problem sets can be inefficient.   For dyslexic students if the information comes in too quickly, they can’t follow steps as a teacher works through problems in real time. A recurring scenario for many students (and not just the dyslexic ones) is that to truly understand, the students must work through the material themselves at home. The lucky ones have a parent, sibling, or someone else to be a tutor, while others may struggle looking at incomplete notes with only a hazy idea of what teachers did to arrive at their answers. Having teachers notes or having a flipped classroom (watch a video first, then see the problems worked by a teacher) can improve this situation, but inevitably there […]

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Daydreaming While Reading [Premium]

Daydreaming While Reading [Premium]

“There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.” – Washington Irving   Daydreaming holds a curious position in the areas of science. On the one hand, daydreaming has been seen as a negative, associated with inattention and poor task persistence, but on the other, associated with creative behavior and personal inspiration. Neuroscientists have taken a renewed interest in daydreaming because daydream pathways activate the default mode network, a brain network that is now known to be important for reflecting on one’s self as well as others, remembering the past, and imagining the future. Studies of dyslexic and non-dyslexic people […]

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Interconnected Multisensory Learning [Premium]

Interconnected Multisensory Learning [Premium]

“My mind isn’t a train track. It’s like a web browser with lots of hyperlinks…” – Honors College Student with Dyslexia   What is interconnected multisensory learning?   INTERCONNECTED MULTISENSORY LEARNING Part of the educational challenges of growing up with dyslexia is learning how to harness the tremendous power that comes with interconnected and multisensory learning. On the advantage side, dyslexic learners are rich experiential and incidental learners. Remember that research study from Sweden and Georgetown University? “The Developmental Dyslexia group was not only not impaired at the task, but actually showed superior recognition memory (emphasis, ours), as compared to the control children. These findings complement previous reports of enhanced cognition in other domains (e.g., visuo-spatial processing) in DD. Possible underlying mechanisms for the observed […]

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Preparing with Templates and Posters [Premium]

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. But often, it’s not just extra time spent; it’s also learning how to streamline certain repetitive features along the lines of “plan better” and not just “work more.” I was recently reminded of this when a social worker posted her work hacks for school and for work. One example is creating a template for her case notes:   The template streamlines repetitive information that needs to be covered and reduces […]

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The Way of Resilient Readers: Vocabulary and Morphology [Premium]

The Way of Resilient Readers: Vocabulary and Morphology [Premium]

There are many informal terms that have come into literature to describe “compensated” dyslexic readers. We coined the term stealth dyslexia to call attention to their pattern on psychometric tests; stealth dyslexics often had this compensated reading pattern where silent reading comprehension was much better than single word reading accuracy or oral fluency.     It’s common to see a pattern of resilient reading by dyslexic students in college or those who have been successfully remediated. Dr. Fumiko Hoeft has found that activity in the left prefrontal region seems to predict reading resilience in children (see below). Interestingly, a study by Farris et al. in the Annals of Dyslexia this year has found that strong vocabulary predicted reading resilience among college students with dyslexia. From […]

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Creating An Environment That Works [Premium]

Creating An Environment That Works [Premium]

Sunlight, air, water, nutrients…we know these are the things that allow plants to grow and flourish, but what are the same essential factors for dyslexic students or employees?     FLEXIBILITY AND SOME CREATIVITY Good environments for dyslexics tend to be those that have some flexibility. Flexibility might take the form of how you may choose to do something vs. the standard way. In college, it might mean a reduced course load when taking difficult subjects, or at work, it might be focusing on project quality and program execution more than hours logged. The classic “bad job” for a dyslexic is work that is assembly-line, repetitive, and lock-step. Sometimes the dilemma is how to get to the good flexible jobs when you’re just starting out […]

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