Auditory Processing Study Results

May 9, 2012 By
Auditory Processing Study Skills

We just posted a new page on our website that reviews the reading gains made by students with auditory processing disorder pre and post Fast ForWord.  Here’s a link to the page:

Fast ForWord Efficacy for APD

While this study covers students with a formal APD diagnosis, to some extent, all of the students who need help with reading have some form of auditory processing difficulty that is creating inefficiencies in how language is heard and broken apart for decoding.  And so the decoding gains and sight word efficiency gains seen in these results are widely applicable to Gemm Learning students with language or reading problems.

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Spotting Dyslexia Before Reading Age

May 2, 2012 By

New Research Into Early Signs of Dyslexia

It is still a point up for discussion as to wy about 10 percent of the world’s population has dyslexia or reading difficulties. Bright and verbal, people with dyslexia have trouble with the written word.

But can the problem be solved before it even begins? Identifying children with dyslexia as preschoolers could lead to better solutions, saving years of frustration in school.

The #1 signal of a child at risk for dyslexia is difficulty rhyming at age 3-4.  This seemingly playful activity is a critical clue that a child is not able to manipulate language, most liekly because of an auditory processing delay that may not be showing up yet in spoken or receptive  language (following directions).

This is a major clue, because reading is essentially a language skill.  fMRIs show a 98% overlap in activity comparing a the brain of a person reading to that same person listening.  Rhyming skill points to a language glitch, which is sufficient reason to treat a child as an at risk reader.  Rhyming is the earliest of dyslexia symptoms.

There may be other clues however.  Researchers in Padua, Italy, tested kindergartners who had not yet learned to read. Those who did poorly on visual attention tests were more likely to struggle with reading later on. Screening children at a very young age could prevent reading struggles that often follow people well into adulthood.

Here is a link to the visual attention research.

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Filed Under: Learning Science, Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With:

Cognitive Training To Boost IQ

April 23, 2012 By
dyslexia program for children

A fascinating article into this weekend’s New York Times magazine,  explores the latest area of brian training, the idea of actually impact IQ, or as it is described in the article, fluid intelligence.

The article explores the various studies that have been done in this area.  In almost all cases, using a variety of cognitive training exercises, were able to show gains that showed up in IQ testing.  The outstanding issues appear to be more related to:

  1. Will the gains be lasting
  2. Do these gains carry-over into improved real world academic performance.

For sure, these are interesting times for brain training programs.  Improved academic performance can come from changing either IQ or learning skills — it is the combination that defines academic outcomes.

Fast ForWord is a cognitive training program used by Gemm Learning, that works almost exclusively on the Learning Skills part Brain Training and IQof this equation, specifically the phonological awareness and working memory skills required for reading.  Our students tend to have an auditory processing disorder or need help with dyslexia, reading fluency or comprehension. By improving processing, focus and working memory skills, our treatment makes language and reading easier and more natural.

Interestingly, Fast ForWord has also been part of long term studies, using an IQ test each year, and it has shown that students have made gains for the 3-4 years after doing the program. We have always attributed these gains to the fact that IQ tests require good reading and language skills, and that is where Fast ForWord excels.  But it is possible that the working memory gains from Fast ForWord, so critical to IQ, really are impacting fluid intelligence.

Interestingly, the last line of the article comments on a 4th grader in class not doing his cognitive training exercises, and comments: “Just like physical exercise, cognitive exercises may prove to be up against something even more resistant to training than fluid intelligence: human nature.”

They are onto something there.  It is why Fast ForWord is offered only with professional oversight to ensure student compliance, and it is the primary mission of Gemm Learning.  We know that if students work on our program regularly they will see gains, often dramatic gains. Our role is to make sure they do it!  And to date we have been successful — our students average 85-90% compliance, where good results require at least 60-65% compliance.

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Filed Under: Learning Science

Great Books for Dyslexic Children Part 1: Author Kevin Henkes

April 17, 2012 By

Are you seeking help for dyslexic children? Whether you’re a dedicated teacher or a concerned parent, you can encourage struggling readers to dive into quality books—and Gemm Learning can help you find books that are both engaging and instructional.

This post kicks off Gemm Learning’s new blog series titled “Great Books for Dyslexic Children.” The first author we’d like to share with you is Kevin Henkes, who has written over 30 children’s books as well as some young adult fiction.

Henkes stands out because of his multiple talents—he writes and illustrates children’s books. You might be familiar with Henkes’ characters, many of whom are cute mice with names such as “Owen” and “Lily.”

Besides getting immersed in Henkes’ illustrations, young readers in grades 1-3 can also learn new vocabulary words from Henkes’ books, making them great supplements to dyslexia programs. The universal appeal of Henkes’ books also makes them a good choice for readers who have ADD, auditory processing disorders, and other reading difficulties.

When children enroll in Gemm Learning’s dyslexia programs, we like to recommend books that are appropriate for their reading levels. Some of the books by Kevin Henkes that Gemm Learning recommends include:

Kitten’s First Full Moon (2005)

  • Reading Level 1.9
  • Winner of the Caldecott Medal for Illustration

Owen (1993)

  • Reading Level 2.4
  • Winner of the Caldecott Medal

Julius, the Baby of the World (1990)

  • Reading Level 3
  • Winner of the ALA Notable Children’s Books in 1990

Want to learn more about Kevin Henkes? Visit his website, which offers downloadable activities as well as information on his books.

Gemm Learning offers reading programs for K-12 children. If you think your child needs help, contact us today for a free demo of our innovative dyslexia program.

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Filed Under: Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With: ,

Fast ForWord Online Available from Gemm Learning

April 16, 2012 By

Gemm Learning Launches Web Based Version of Fast ForWord

Anytime, anywhere access improves convenience for students of diverse ages and abilities

 
With one click, parents working from home can now have instant access the Fast ForWord family of educational software products via the Internet. 
 
Using innovative technology, based on more than 30 years of brain research, Fast ForWord accelerates learning by building brain fitness in four critical areas: memory, attention, auditory processing, and sequencing. As a result, learners can make one to two years of gains in just a few weeks, and maintain an accelerated rate of learning even after the programs end.
 
By providing online access to the entire Fast ForWord family of products, with no additional hardware or software to install, the web version simplifies the start process for families, and allows students to use different computers one day to the next if needed.
 
With individualized protocols, developed by our educators after starting assessments and a few days of obeservation on the program, Gemm Learning can serve a wide spectrum of learners from preschool through high school and adult, including help with reading, auditory processing, dyslexia, attention deficit and other learning disabilities.
 
Note:   Downloaded software is still available for families preferring to have Fast ForWord on their computer.
 
The formal name of the online Fast ForWord program is mySciLearn or Fast ForWord on Demand.  If you would like to learn more about this program, call 877-914-4366 to see if it is the right fit for your child.
 
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A baseball lesson for struggling learners

February 29, 2012 By

Resolve Underlying Issues To Enable Long Term Success

Fix core issues, rather than tutor symptoms

There are two ways to help a child with a broken wrist learn to hit a baseball:

  • Instruct. Tell him how to keep his eye on the ball, to step into the swing, etc.
  • Fix the broken wrist! 
Both will help, and of course, both are needed.
   
Meanwhile, in learning, while 10-15% of all children labor with cognitive difficulties, most families chose only one strategy — instruction, either extra help at school and/or at home. 
 
We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to resolve a problem is to find and address the underlying cause. 
 
It applies to a broken wrist in baseball, and it applies to weak cognitive skills needed for reading and learning.
 
A few months of intense brain fitness training can remove impediments to learning once and for all, creating gains in reading, learning efficiency, confidence and focus that will last a lifetime.
  
Why Not Try To Fix The Issue?
There are reasons many families do not try brain fitness training:
  • Skepticism that a brain can in fact be rewired.
  • Concern about the cost.
  • Concern about schedule — training is rigorous.
Skeptical?  Don’t Be. Brain Plasticity Is Real.
The idea that the brain will respond to exercise, the same way a muscle can be strengthened or trained, should not seem far-fetched.
 
The amazing capability of the body to heal itself, and of the brain to do all kinds of things, is in the news every day.  For instance, think about Senator Giffords — much of her brain was permanently damaged, but she is gradually rebuilding using other brain tissue. 
 
With just a little more processing practice — using our Fast ForWord program – many struggling learners can indeed get over the hump, to read and learn comfortably.
  
Correcting a Problem is an Investment, Not a Cost.
Our program costs $1,320 for three months, then $275 a month after that. Most students spend 5 months with us.
 
This is not cheap, but our neuroscience based software with “virtual center” service — high touch educator based monitoring, coaching and support – is no small undertaking.
 
Our goals are bold — getting your child off the tutoring treadmill, reading and learning independence.  While we think the confidence and self-esteem that comes with achieving these goals is priceless, most of the time, it’s a one-time investment that will save thousands of dollars in future tutoring and other costs.
 
Only 30 Minutes A Day.
As with learning physical skills, our program requires frequency and intensity — 30 minutes a day, five days a week. 
 
This seems a lot, but while many parents start with us concerned about the protocol time, it turns out that over seven days, families are able to find 30 minutes of five of those days, for something this important. 
 
This is particularly true once they start to see gains.
 
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Filed Under: Learning Science Tagged With: , ,

A Cognitive Psychologist & Barn Owls

February 17, 2012 By

You Can Climb or Learn Anything .. If  The Steps Are Close Enough Together

There is a fascinating new book, called Guitar Zero, The New Musician and the Science of Learning  by cognitive  psychologist, Gary Marcus that investigates how the brain learns.  He recently answered questions for the New Times, and one stood out to us:

Question: Can an old dog learn new tricks? Bert Gold, Frederick, Md.
Answer (by Gary Marcus):

“Absolutely, but possibly not as swiftly as a young pup.

One of my favorite studies in the last decade looked at barn owls, as a test case studying the idea of “critical periods.” Barn owls aren’t blind, but they can navigate better in the dark by learning to calibrate their eyes and their ears. The Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen put prisms in front of owls’ eyes, disrupting their normal capacity to link what they see with what they hear; young owls could easily learn to compensate for the distortion, a shift of 23 degrees, whereas old owls could not.

But in a more recent study, the same researcher discovered that adult owls weren’t hopeless after all, just slower. An adult owl can’t adapt to 23 degrees of distortion in a few days like a baby owl can, but the adult owls can manage just fine, if the job is simply broken down into smaller chunks: a few weeks at 6 degrees, another few weeks at 11 degrees and so on.

Knowing that was a huge inspiration to me in my own quest. The key is breaking down the task into smaller pieces.”

In neuroscience this is called “shaping” and it equates to tried and true methods used in learning all kinds of physical skills.  And this is the secret sauce that makes our reading programs so powerful.  When a child is very young, 0-3, their ability to develop new learning skills is incredible. 

However, if a child does not get set by the time they turn 4 years of age, it does not mean they still cannot develop these skills. 

They can.

It’s just that the way they were learning early in life, just through natural conversation and listening, becomes less effective and so they need things to broken down into smaller steps.  Our cognitive software does just that, making improvements in the cognitive skills needed for reading and learning proficiency possible at any age.

Here’s a link to the Gary Marcus article where answers reader questions

 

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Automaticity is the Key to Learning

February 10, 2012 By

Riding a bike would be difficult if the rider had to concentrate on balance, steering, etc. But with a little practice, these skills can be automated — done subconsciously, without thinking – which makes riding a bike easy.

Learning and reading can be easy also.

If auditory processing is automatic.

Skilled learners read easily, with automaticity, and absorb teacher instruction in class effortlessly.  However, struggling learners:

  • find listening in class exhausting, and/or
  • grind through reading, never really mastering decoding.   

For them, language is anything but automatic.  It requires concentration, making listening, reading and thinking exhausting and inefficient.  These difficulties often do not show up in speech, only in reading and/or learning, where the processing efficiency requirement is higher.

Developing Automaticity

Most children develop the processing skills needed for learning and reading, through the exercise that comes from listening and interacting with the world around them in early life.

Some children, however, need more processing practice than occurs naturally in those early years. 

In most cases, by the time your child is an adult he/she will get enough practice to finally develop some measure of automaticity.  But, this delayed development often comes too late to change academic outcomes.

The sooner a child can develop automaticity the better. 

This is where Gemm Learning can help.

Our Automaticity Practice 

Our auditory processing treatment is a  cognitive program, Fast ForWord, which provides intense language stimulation — cognitive brain fitness training, processing practice — that many children need to develop automaticity. 

Fast ForWord helps expressive and receptive language, automatic listening — not sound through water, but rather the ability to think while listening — that leads directly to learning efficiency

Our ultimate program goal is reading comprehension, achieved by Fast ForWord in two phases: first, it helps students become automatic decoders, fluent readers, and then helps the student learn to think while reading, reading comprehension.

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Are ADD Drugs Always A Bad Idea?

January 29, 2012 By

Ritalin Gone Wrong?

There is a  must read article for any parent with a child on ADD medicine in today’s NY Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a behavioral psychologist. 

He makes the case that parents should rethink using drugs to solve a short term focus issue at school. The article makes the case that there is no medical evidence that these drugs meet any chemical imbalance in the brain — as many neuro-scientists and clinicians have argued as a reason to prescribe these drugs — but rather, these drugs will help anyone taking them perform at a higher level.  They are a band aid for struggling students.

The article further argues that the drugs have no curative powers, and that in fact, over time they lose effectiveness and the  brain develops immunity. Furthermore it reports a long term study that shows there to be no long term benefits from the drugs in terms of academic or behavioral gains.

While this article finally argues that ADD is a product of environmental shaping, it also questions if ADD medicine is ever a good idea.  This seems to be an extreme position.  It is easy for a psychologist to lecture parents about resisting the option of helping their children perform at a higher level at school immediately.  And given that the improved concentration for sure helps grades near term, it seems hard to argue that there is at least not some merit in using ADD medicine, at least for a short period. 

 Natural ADD Treatments, Drug Free

Where Dr. Sroufe does have merit though is in pointing out that there are no long term benefits, only downside from all the side effects.  This refutes the argument that ADD medicine serves some medical purpose.  It does not.  It’s a band-aid to help children focus on material they do not find interesting or to help fight exhaustion.

What is left unsaid in the article is that the most promising way to address ADD is to find the causes of the “lack of interest” in class or the “exhaustion” from the school day, and then treat them. Very often, these issues are caused by auditory processing disorder, which makes listening exhausting (due to inefficiency) and/or uninteresting because the listener is not able to keep up — it’s likened to listening to sound through water.

 Rather than medicate this listening exhaustion or lack of interest in school, there are treatments for auditory processing disorder that improve processing efficiency to remove the source of exhaustion, and to speed up processing, so that more material is picked up in class, making it more interesting.  This almost always improves focus.

And so, while we do not believe ADD medication is always a bad idea, we do feel that any drug regimen should be combined with non-medical interventions, like Fast ForWord, that aim to remediate the underlying learning deficits that are causing the lack of focus in the first place.  As it happens, Fast ForWord has exercises that work on the elements of inattentiveness – distractibility, impulsiveness, stamina – as part of a comprehensive approach to improving learning.

Whether it is Fast ForWord or some other cognitive training,  parents should be aware that to medicate without a longer term plan to address underlying issues is increasingly being understood to be fraught with risk and longer term consequences for the child.   This article represents an important step forward in this regard.

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Dyslexics Struggle With Processing Auditory Sounds, Not Word Meaning

January 20, 2012 By

Reading Is A Language Skill

One of the most stubborn misconceptions in learning is that dyslexia is a visual problem related to mixing up letters.  This was proven incorrect may years ago with Paula Tallal ground breaking work that proved an almost perfect correlation between reading and auditory processing difficulties.

However as long as the misconception continues, researchers are looking for novel ways to confirm the initial finding.  For instance, one study released in August, 2011, conducted by the researchers at MIT further confirmed that the difficulties children with dyslexia have with reading is related to how they process language.

The study involved recognition of voices, a listening skill, not a visual skill.  Here is the article link:  http://www.geekosystem.com/spoken-language-dyslexia/

Gemm Learning uses a language processing dyslexia treatment called Fast ForWord software.

 

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Filed Under: Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With:
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