Tom Friedman, New York Times reporter, wrote an interesting article this week about how American students highest in the world or near to it in 4th grade, but by 10th grade they are 25th in the OECD. He goes into theories about charter schools and money and teachers, but how about this?

1/ American kids don't want it as much. This is Clayton Christenson's idea in "Disrupting Class". They see their parents life, it's fine for them, and so they cruise assuming it will be handed to them on a silver platter. And chances are they are right about that. South Korean kids do not like what they see when they look at their parents life, they want more and so they work hard.

2/ Kids do not connect reading with fun and so as they get older and more independent they do less and less of it, leading to general academic decline.

The fact is American kids have a big educational disadvantage. They are "fat and happy" -- this is a pretty difficult motivation to over-turn.

But parents can influence point 2/. The answer to falling 12th grade standards seems to be to start on content earlier and earlier. Wrong! Because schools and parents do this, children do not get their foundations set. If they were not quite reading comfortably, in a way that can lead to reading enjoyment, too bad --there's homework to do and tests to pass. This is not the school's fault -- schools reflect the desires of their communities.

Foundations are important. The primary goal of Elementary School should be to secure the foundations so that children can prosper later on. Because this is not being done fewer and fewer students learn to love reading and avoid the tough subjects like science and math.

What can parents do? The old standard "The Read Out Loud Handbook" (Jim Trelease) argues the connection between reading and fun is best maintained through reading out loud to your child as late into life as possible, certainly through 5th grade but beyond that also. Another suggestion is to keep investing in reading skills -- if your child does not enjoy reading, try course like the Fast ForWord program, Lindamood Bell or other programs that will help provide reading comfort. Reading comfort will lead to more reading (just as closed captioning helps Finnish kids lead the world in reading!) and hopefully reading enjoyment, a virtuous circle.

Don't you find it interesting how muted the media coverage was of President Obama's powerful speech on education. There was a lot of bold insights and strategies in that speech and yet it was greeted with a yawn.
I think this tells us there is a lot complacency in the public these days about the value of education and the quality of education children are receiving. Famous business author Clayton Christensen in his book Disrupting Class argued that America was lagging in education in large part because children don't want it as much. They are growing up in a comfortable life style, catered to at every turn and so what's the big deal. Things will turn out fine. In Korea though, kids grow up in poverty and so they are motivated to get to a better place, so they work hard. In fact the whole population is focused on pulling themselves up to a better place through education.
The reaction to Obama's speech I think proves Christensen's point. I think it also explains why change in US education happens at a glacial place. New programs such as the Fast ForWord reading program or approaches take decades to take hold. The feeling for a large majority of the constituents -- parents, educators, tax payers -- is that the education stakes are just not that high.
This reactive mindset may have onset at exactly the wrong time. The current high school generation may be in for a shock as a confluence of factors collide: less economic opportunity, a virtual business world where employees world wide compete for the same jobs, and educationally inferior standards in the US. This more than anything may define our economic future.

Metacognition
An elusive but defining element of learning success.

Without metacognition -- learning awareness -- your child cannot achieve at his or her potential. Delays in developing this most crucial of learning skills explains why many struggling early graders go on to under-achieve at high school and college.

What is it?
Metacognition refers to a level of thinking about what you are learning as you learn (listening to a teacher, reading or studying): Am I getting this? Does this fit with my current knowledge? If I am not getting it, what should I do right now -- re-read, get help?

Planning the way to approach a learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating the progress towards the completion of a task: these require metacognition. Similarly, maintaining motivation to see a task to completion is a metacognitive skill.

Why Is It Important?
Students who demonstrate a wide range of metacognitive skills perform better on exams and complete work more efficiently. They are self-regulated learners who utilize the "right tool for the job" and modify learning strategies and skills based on their awareness of effectiveness.

A student with metacognition is aware of his or her own strengths and weaknesses, the nature of the task at hand, and available "tools" or skills. Individuals with a high level of metacognitive knowledge and skill identify blocks to learning as early as possible and change "tools" or strategies to ensure goal attainment.

Why Many Students Do Not Develop Metacognition
Metacognition when reading/listening to a teacher requires free brain capacity, headroom to think over and above the listening or reading. And so the information needs to be coming to the student automatically, subconsciously like riding a bike.

If child's learning mechanism is overloaded --if reading is not automatic, if listening in class, i.e., auditory processing, is inefficient -- then metacognition cannot develop as it should.

About half of all students in the US leave 8th grade below grade level. The vast majority have delayed metacognitive skills. They may well have functional reading and listening skills but these skills are inefficient, taking up too much conscious brain space, crowding out metacognitive development.

Our Programs Aim to Develop Metacognition
Gemm Learning uses Fast ForWord software to help the brain learn to process efficiently, which frees up brain capacity for development of metacognition.

These skills take years to develop. Time lost learning the basics such as efficient listening or reading with automaticity impacts metacognitive skills later. If you think your child has an over-loaded learning mechanism that could lead to a metacognitive gap later in life, fill in this screening to see if we can help.

For more on metacognition when reading click here.

Story by BBC News (abridged)
A medical student in the UK with dyslexia claims multiple choice exams discriminate against people with the condition and is taking legal action to prevent their use.

But why do children who struggle with reading find multiple choice difficult? Dyslexia is known to cause problems with the way the brain processes words and sequences, and students with the condition are generally granted 25% extra time in exams.

But Naomi Gadian, a second year medical student, is calling for the General Medical Council to scrap multiple choice questions as part of doctors' training. She says although essays and practicals have not been a problem, multiple choice questions discriminate against people with dyslexia. "They don't let me express my knowledge. In normal day life, you don't get given multiple choice questions to sit. Your patients aren't going to ask you 'here's an option and four answers. Which one is right?'" she says.

THE ANSWER
A lot of information in one question can be difficult to remember. So are multiple choice questions particularly difficult for people with dyslexia? Dr John Rack, head of psychology at Dyslexia Action, says people with the condition can find multiple choice questions difficult because of the large amount of information which they have to deal with, all at once. "Dyslexics often have problems with their 'working memory'," he says, "which is the space where we hold on to information. If there are too many options, it is hard to keep track of them and by the last option, they have forgotten the first."He says everyone can find this problematic, but those with dyslexia find it harder - especially as they tend to read more slowly.

Reasonable adjustments
But Dr Rack does not think multiple choice is the worst exam format for those who have dyslexia - and says it is unusual for people to have a particular problem with them. He says case studies and essays can put pressure on the speed of writing and fluent writing skills such as spelling, structuring and sequencing.

"So long as multiple choice questions are well structured and short, they should be fairly accessible," he says.

Story from BBC NEWS
It is interesting that test skills and learning skills overlap. Gemm Learning's programs aimed at resolving learning issues also work in the test prep format.

If you are intrigued by the idea of brain plasticity but find it hard to get your head around the concept, The Brain that Changes Itself is a great book.

As related in this book, the adaptability, self-healing and rejuvenating power of the brain when exercised the right way is amazing. The stories of miracle recoveries and transformations are heart warming and exciting. The book tracks the experiments and clinical trials that lead to our current understanding that the brain is indeed "plastic" -- it is adaptable and malleable -- as these tidbits show:

A neuroscientist nursed his father back to full health after a massive stroke using brain exercises. After his father's death years later they discovered that the brain had reconstructed itself using only the 3% (!!) of mass not stroke affected.

The brain of a person who had lost all sense of balance learned how to balance again using outside sensors to re-learn what to do, then rebuilding internal vestibular skills.

Experiments such as one with ferrets, where the brains connections to the eyes and ears were surgically switched. Two months later the previously auditory part of the brain was now processing visual signals. It adapted.

ENTER MIKE MERZENICH

Of course, a book like this has a lot about Fast ForWord software and its co-founder, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Here's an excerpt:
"......Merzenich is worth the search. The Irish neuroscientist Ian Robertson has described him as "the world's leading researcher on brain plasticity." Merzenich's specialty is improving people's ability to think and perceive by redesigning the brain by training specific processing areas, called brain maps, so that they do more mental work. He has also, perhaps more than any other scientist, shown in rich scientific detail how our brain-processing areas change....."

All kinds of media and respected individuals have praised this book for taking a dry subject like brain plasticity and bringing it to life through personal experiences.

If you have a child with a learning issue that concerns you, this book will give you renewed hope that the future is bright and that a better outcome is possible.

Spotting and treating learning difficulties early is vital for children's mental well being, a UK government report has found. The report from Foresight, the government think tank on the future, said learning difficulties were a problem that affected up to 10% of children.

"Yet too often they remain unidentified, or are treated only when advanced. The result can be under-achievement in school and disengagement by the child, sometimes leading to a long-term cycle of anti-social behavior, exclusion and even criminality," it said.

"Improvements in early detection combined with focused interventions could prevent problems developing and create broad and lasting benefits for the child and society."

The report found that dyslexia and dyscalculia (math learning problems) can both substantially reduce lifetime earnings and academic achievement, with dyscalculia potentially as common as dyslexia but frequently undetected.

"We need to empower professionals at schools to better address the needs of individual children, and to improve learning and development trajectories.

Parents also need to be vigilant. Know the signs of language and learning issues under 5 years of age, and the signs of reading difficulties 4-7 years of age. Here's one article that we wrote for Parent Guide called Looking for Clues.

Even small gains from interventions at elementary school or earlier will have out-sized benefits over a lifetime, in and out of school, due to the power of compounding.

There's no doubt that a kid who reads the SAT prep books, and takes a Kaplan course, will have some advantage over someone with no familiarity with the test. But if the test can be gamed through these tools, why doesn't everyone score 2400? The reality is that -- for all the prepping -- tests like the SAT still measure your ability to solve problems quickly when faced with new information. Even if you've seen 1,000 math problems before, you haven't seen this exact one. You haven't seen this exact reading passage, so you haven't been asked these specific questions. For all their flaws, standardized tests still measure your ability to synthesize information and think on your feet, a core ability that is not that easy to prep for.

That's not to say that traditional ACT and SAT prep has no value. They do provide structure -- regular classes or tutoring that make the student study in an organized way and invest time in at least getting familiar with the test.

The most dramatic score boosts on cognitive assessments like the SAT or private school ISEE or TACHS (catholic schools) come from improving the actual thinking skills being measured. This is what Gemm Learning does with our home-based Test Fundamentals program.

We offer traditional test prep too, at our centers as a service to our students, but the dramatic point gains we have been achieving are due to the impact Test Fundamentals has had on cognitive abilities as captured in these IQ scores.

Another advantage of boosting underlying learning ability is that the gains endure well beyond the test, in fact for a lifetime. And in these increasingly uncertain economic times, having a little more learning horsepower at college may end up being a difference maker.