A Specialty Tailored Treatment Plan
Processing delays hinder effective learning. Once these delays have been identified the appropriate interventions can be provided. Because we offer a large variety of research-based solutions, we have many options to meet each client’s needs. These options may include one or more of the following remediation resolutions, based on the child’s needs.
Focus, Attention, Memory and Cognitive Therapy -
We offer several effective therapies that increases focus, attention, memory, organizational skills, positive mood, willingness to complete homework and decreases anxiety. These therapies are performed on computers, are short in duration, cost-effective and research has demonstrated their long-lasting effects.
CogMed -
Article by Karla Jay
Is Working Memory more important than IQ?
Yes, Yes, Yes, according to the leaders in working memory research! I just attended a conference where I had the privilege of hearing several of the world's leading experts on working memory present their perspective on the link between Working Memory and ADHD (Drs Rapport, Tannock and Fassbender/Schweitzer), the state of Working Memory and increasing cognitive skills (Dr. Klingberg), and Working Memory in the classroom and an increase in academic scores (Dr. Gathercole).
Basically the new research points to this:
- A child’s success in all aspects of learning comes down to how good their working memory is regardless of their IQ score. This means that having a good working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of academic success than knowing the child’s IQ score in the early years.
- The studies also found that, as opposed to IQ, working memory is not linked to the parents’ level of education or socio-economic background. This means all children regardless of background or environmental influence can have the same opportunities to fulfill potential if working memory is assessed and problems addressed where necessary.
- As many as 10% of school age children may suffer from poor working memory, British researchers found, yet the problem remains rarely identified. "You can think of working memory as a pure measure of your child's potential," Dr. Tracey Alloway of Britain's Durham University studies said of their results. "Some psychologists consider working memory to be the new IQ because we find that working memory is the single most important predictor of learning," Alloway added.
- Many children that had been thought to be lazy or underachievers really were found to have poor working memory ability.
- Another finding was that with early identification and formalized memory training, these poor memory skills can improve and problems in ADHD, math, reading comprehension and overall learning speed also improved!
What is working memory?
Working memory is described as “the ability to hold several facts or thoughts in short term memory while solving a problem or performing a task.” We use our working memory all day long without thinking about the process. People with working memory problems can’t “hang onto” the information long enough to do that.
For example, here is a working memory task. An adult would listen to this sequence of numbers and letters, “4-B-1-D-5” and then repeat them by first putting the numbers in order from low to high and the letters in order at the end from A-Z. The answer is “1-4-5-B-D. After 12 to 15 trials of this, the mind starts to fatigue. You are in trouble because you can’t just guess at the answer to get it right; you actually have to be actively engaged with the material! Other working memory tasks might be that you are shown a series of 6-8 pictures, then the cards are shuffled and you need to put them back in the correct order or you hear words like, “cat-green-bowl-jump-boat” and then you are asked, “What was the second word? What is the fourth word?”
This “being engaged” with the material and mental fatigue is why new studies on ADHD point to working memory deficits as being one of the main causes of that disorder. Once the mind fatigues, the person stops listening or performing the task because it’s too hard. With less to attend to, the child becomes focused on other things that don’t require diligent brain work.
We know that besides having a huge impact on attention and focus, working memory deficits also impact:
- Reading comprehension because it’s too hard to remember the characters in the story, the sequence of the plot and the order of the syntax.
- Understanding spoken language because the listener needs to track the meaning in the speaker’s words long enough so that there is meaning and not just a bunch of little phrases being processed.
- Writing because a person needs to recall perhaps one or two thoughts or main ideas as he is putting them on paper. To write a paragraph or a story, a person needs to remember the overall story, the order in which he needs to tell it and the characters, events, the rules of writing, the grammar, etc. It’s too much to remember!
- Problem solving because it requires that you cling to clues in your head while deducing or inferring from a small amount of information at hand.
- Math because so much of arithmetic is a two or three step operation. Any part of a problem that should be rehearsed while doing the next step has a very good chance of being forgotten in a person with poor working memory skills. (Like in real life. If you have forty dollars and you’re shopping and you are keeping track of what you have spent so far, that’s working memory.
The question many researchers are struggling with is how to help people with this problem. In the past, children have been taught compensation techniques like rehearsing everything they hear and see in order to keep it active in the mind, but this isn’t very efficient and the carry-over to performance is slow or non-existent.
Dr. Mel Levine, co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, in Durham, North Carolina says, "In children with learning difficulties, working memory becomes a huge issue, especially around middle school where the demands on working memory grow dramatically." Short term memory can become overloaded if everything circulating there is not moved on to long term memory areas. By making the working memory process more efficient or fluid, this frees up the ability to take in more information faster.
Recent research out of Sweden and other big universities in the United States demonstrated that children with ADHD, academic problems and adults with symptoms of stroke all greatly benefited from working memory practice from a program called CogMed (www.CogMed.com.) because it is intensive, cost-effective and can be completed at home or in school. Academic skills increased dramatically after three months of training with this therapy and attention improved in almost all of the children. (www.childrenslearningclinic.com)
Poor working memory has been proven to influence a person’s ability to learn or to pay attention to a task for a longer period of time. Poor memory can come about because of Dyslexia, ADHD, a brain injury, people recovering from chemotherapy, or persons with generalized specific learning disorders. Whatever the cause, we now know that greater focus needs to be paid to the working memory ability of an individual instead of the person’s IQ or intellectual function.
Working memory is the new IQ.)
Interactive Metronome -
This great program began in 1999 as a treatment foe attention and focus. All of these years later, research has proven its additional effectiveness in many areas such as: sports performance, speech and language fluency, small motor and large motor delays, faster thinking and processing skills, academics, brain trauma and stroke. Dr. Edward Hallowell, the author of Driven to Distraction writes: “This program is spectacularly helpful. It is one of the most promising developments with non-medication of ADHD that’s come along in a long while. This is a really solid, extremely helpful non-medication intervention not only for ADHD but for mental functioning in general.
Visual Processing Disorder/Irlen Syndrome -
For some children, the words are slippery minnows that their eyes can’t catch a hold of. The Irlen Syndrome is a set of symptoms that cause a child to perceive movement on the page, especially if the page has a lot of information on it. In fact, 46% of low readers are found to have the Irlen Syndrome. These children can become tired when reading, lose their place on the page, get headaches, misread easy words, and their reading comprehension can be poor. Colored Irlen-overlays and the use of colored paper prevents the perceived movement or brightness on the page, allowing a stress-reduced reading experience.
Article by Karla Jay -
Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses;
Does your child have the Irlen Syndrome?
Cara is a thirteen year old girl who throws up everyday at school. She has been to doctor after doctor, including psychologists and psychiatrists, and all that has been decided is that she is just very anxious about school. She is taking medicine to reduce this stress which just makes her tired and she still vomits each day.
Robert hates reading and although he can do it he refuses and has become a behavior problem whenever he is required to sit down and read. He says the words do weird things on the page and he can’t see them. The eye doctor reports that his vision is fine. He has a list of complaints but his parents suspect he’s making these up to get out of doing his school work.
Neither of these children is either anxious or misbehaving; with a quick test at U CAN LEARN, they were found to have the Irlen Syndrome (previously called Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome), a condition within the sight regions of the brain that make reading more difficult and fatiguing. Words can move on the page or flicker. It becomes hard for a person with the Irlen Syndrome to shift gaze from different surfaces, for example, from a book to a notebook or from blackboard to paper, without losing their place. It can cause headaches, fatigue and anxiety if not treated. Many people with it report lower energy levels, decreased motivation or depression.
Both Cara and Robert are now reading and enjoying school for the first time. Both wear Irlen-colored glasses. Cara’s are turquoise-ish gray and Robert’s are purple. The testing revealed that the page spun for Cara and when asked why she never said anything about it, she said, “Because that’s what it has always done. My classmate’s pages spin when I look at their books and they are reading just fine so I thought I was stupid.” Robert reported that the background on the page seemed stronger than the words and he immediately saw white patterns or rivers running down the page so it became work to try to see the words around all of this intrusive information. If they don’t want to wear their colored glasses all of the time, they use Irlen overlays that they put over the printed material to make it calm down and stay still.
Helen Irlen, as reading specialist in Long Beach, CA, discovered the Irlen Syndrome almost by accident. Now with over fifty different research studies world-wide, the Irlen Syndrome has been proven to interfere with reading, writing, focused attention and to cause stress and fatigue in visual activities. The research can be viewed at www.Irlen.com.
The symptoms of the Irlen syndrome can look like other problems, in particular Dyslexia or ADHD. If the words are moving on the page, a child is not going to spend a lot of time reading or trying to read.
Some of the common symptoms of the syndrome are:
A child may skip words or lines, misread words, repeat or reread lines, demonstrate slow, choppy reading, need lots of breaks, rub their eyes, complain of tiredness or eye strain, fall asleep while reading, experience headaches or dizziness from visual activities, have a hard time comprehending or remembering what they’ve just read, become bothered by bright lights or read from the page with it turned at an odd angle.
The Irlen syndrome affects 15% of the general population but in struggling readers, it is 46%. There is a strong genetic component and we often find that several children in a family can have it but at varying degrees of severity. The rule of thumb for seeking help for the stress and fatigue associated with the syndrome is that if it isn’t interfering with school or life, it’s not a problem.
The effects of the Irlen Syndrome may present themselves in other areas, too. It can affect handwriting because the spacing between words is missing or the writing goes uphill or down. Spelling or math can be difficult because of not being able to study the words or align the math problems properly in order to solve them. The speed drill type of testing is hard because under stress the symptoms of visual distress increase. This answers why some children know the information inside and out but go into class and ‘blow it’ on the test the next day. Reading music can be hard as well as computer use.
The Irlen syndrome has baffled educators and scientists in the past. It seemed too easy a solution to throw some colored sheets over the page and then a child started reading. It still remains undetected by standard educational or medical tests. What we have seen in recent years is an increase in the number of educators and medical doctors who now have seen the results of treating a child for this syndrome and the willingness to accept this set of symptoms as a true blockage to learning.
Understanding that the Irlen syndrome may be a piece of the puzzle in a child’s academic struggles is the first step. Asking the right questions is the second. The next time your child balks at sitting down to read, instead of asking him why he won’t read, you should ask him, ‘What happens when you look at the page?
Auditory Processing Disorder Therapies -
Two highly effective treatments for Central Auditory Processing Disorder utilize computer-based programs that are completed at home for approximately 6-16 weeks and monitored by our staff at U CAN LEARN. These can also be completed in our centers as the need arises. Additional worksheets are used to allow the individual to gain improved auditory processing skills while they are having fun completing them.
Dyslexia Evaluation and Treatment
Dyslexia is a language -based processing disorder caused by differing problems with the input system, whether is it visual inaccuracy, poor auditory skills, phonemic awareness weaknesses, poor working memory, or slow neuro-timing. Our in-depth and detailed evaluation of this disorder results in understanding the specific challenges and components of Dyslexia. Our highly-effective programs are a blend of computer based intervention, direct instructional methods (based on the Orton-Gillingham program), as well as homework practice. Using the newest research based programs, struggling readers improve at least two years in reading comprehension and accuracy skill after six months of instruction.
Cognitive Fluency/Rapid naming therapy -
Article by Karla Jay -
Rapid Automatic Naming--- The fast talker wins when it comes to reading!!!
Brandy is in the second grade and she has finally learned to read! This is good news to her family who worried because at first she had a very hard time sounding out words. The only area that she struggles in is that she still reads so slowly. Everyone says that if she just keeps reading, she will get faster, and her fluency will improve.
Research is proving that theory is not quite right.
Although good phonological processing or awareness skills are very important skills in reading well, there are other factors that influence speed and fluency. Good phonological processing means that a child understands that the symbol or letter on paper has a sound and when those letters go together, it makes a word. M-A-D when sounded out is a word. They also learn to manipulate words, ‘Mad’ changes by putting a ‘B’ at the beginning or a ‘T’ at the end. Brandy now has these good phonological processing skills.
The skill that affects the speed at which a person reads is relatively new in the field of reading research. This skill is often described as Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN), which is a person’s ability to translate visual information into a phonological code quickly and easily. What researchers found (Wolf and Bowers, 2000) was that, just as some children are taller than their peers or can run faster than their peers, some children are also much faster at identifying visual information than their peers.
They related the study to this: If you asked a group of children to run around the block, you would expect some children to finish faster than others. Likewise, if you were to ask a group of children to identify ten pictures of common objects as fast as they could, you would find that some children are able to identify those ten objects very quickly while others take a little more time. What was interesting was that those children who were a little slower to name pictures of objects, also tended to be slower in identifying letters of the alphabet or printed words from a list
Lovett, Steinbach, and Frijters, (2000) performed research that showed that in one second of reading, a fast skilled reader is able to recognize and process about five words in running text. That translates into about 300 words read per minute. However a slow reader who is still skilled at reading, may only read 230 words per minute -- about 3/4ths of the speed of their faster peers.
We can ask ourselves if this matters.
It does as a child is trying to develop his reading skills. Children who naturally process visual information quickly and easily often have an easier time learning to read than their peers who tend to process visual information more slowly. And this only stands to reason that children who process visual information more rapidly tend to get more out of the time they spend reading than their slower processing peers. They like it because the words create pictures faster, the story moves along like a story should.
A decade ago The National Reading Panel established five areas of effective classroom reading instruction: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and comprehension. Because of this list, schools have focused on children who have difficulty processing phonological information and trouble with the phonemes in speech. Schools now teach children to develop phoneme awareness so they can develop proficient decoding skills. Unfortunately, less is known about Rapid Automatic Naming. It is not as easy to identify at a young age, and even when identified, improving RAN and visual processing speed is considerably more difficult than helping children develop phoneme awareness.
Slow Rapid Naming ability also can be seen in word retrieval situations. This affects academic word recall of new knowledge, creates a slower ability to think of answers, and causes problems not only in reading, but also in generating written assignments.
When you increase your child’s rapid automatic naming ability, you increase his ability to see letters faster, to quickly process them as words, and you watch his reading fluency increase!)
Tutoring Services
We offer specialized one on one tutoring to increase a child’s ability in writing, spelling, arithmetic, processing and reading skills. Our tutors are positive, engaging and have a child-oriented background that blends all of the elements into what makes a great tutor.
Section 504 Accommodation Support
Once a learning delay or an area of deficit has been identified, we help you approach your child’s school with 504 accommodation suggestions to enable him to learn at his maximum potential without ridicule or discrimination.
Cognitive Enhancement Program—Take your brain to the Gym!
As the baby-boomers age, they’re wondering where their minds have gone to! This program is a combination of our already successful memory, attention and cognitive training programs with a little word play, deductive thinking and puzzle pizzazz thrown in to make this experience fun and long lasting! A recent study involving seven adults who are completed 16 hours of this mental training have positive things to say!
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