Working Together: Improving the Educational Outcomes of Students with Learning Disorders

The intervention programs available to children with learning disabilities are numerous. In the city of Vancouver, for example, students with learning disabilities are offered a variety of services, from tutors and typing programs, to organizational coaches and occupational therapists. Parents who watch their child struggling in school often request an assessment from a school psychologist or seek a private assessment from a registered psychologist. The psychologist then analyzes the student’s profile and makes program or referral recommendations. Due to the breadth of learning disability subtypes the number of recommendations can be numerous. It can be difficult for parents and teachers to both plan out, and then implement, the many recommendations from these psycho-educational assessments.

The questions I get from parents and professionals are: how does the Arrowsmith Program fit into the array of services already available, and, how could the Arrowsmith Program help students in conjunction with other programs currently being offered? I hope this article provides some clarity on these matters. The key concept is that the Arrowsmith Program works in conjunction with other programs. My focus is working together toward a common goal of improving the educational and life outcomes of individuals with learning disabilities and attention disorders.

The Arrowsmith Program is a relatively new intervention method available in Vancouver for students with learning disabilities and attention difficulties (although it has been available in Toronto for over 30 years). The Arrowsmith Program focuses on improving the underlying cognitive weaknesses that cause learning disorders. In short, it works on improving the neurological dysfunctions that hinder the acquisition of achievement skills or learning in a classroom environment, including social perception and life functioning.

Take the act of reading for example. The Arrowsmith Program targets brain regions that are involved with the acquisition of this skill. Areas in the brain that recognize letter symbols, process speech sounds, scan visual symbols and increase reasoning ability are targeted for neurological improvement. The Arrowsmith Program itself does not explicitly teach sound/symbol letter patterns in the English language; rather, once the neurological areas for reading acquisition are improved, the student can be introduced to sound/symbol letter patterns through various reading programs available and is now neurologically capable of acquiring reading skills such as decoding and comprehension. This is just one example of how the Arrowsmith Program focuses on improving the neurological weaknesses which contribute to learning disorders. Additional areas of weakness are also targeted with the same focus on the improving neurological ability to acquire language, motor abilities, social skills, reasoning, attention control, planning and organizational ability, and math and written expression skills.

By strengthening the foundation of the underlying neurological capacities, The Arrowsmith Program lays the groundwork for other services which build academic skills. In harmonizing the Arrowsmith Program with achievement-based intervention programs, professionals in the field of Learning Disabilities can work together to improve the educational outcomes of students with Learning Disorders. Following is a discussion of various intervention programs and an outline of how the Arrowsmith Program strengthens cognitive capacities, creating a foundation that allows students to benefit from the services described below.

1) Classroom Teacher Support

Being able to function in a classroom environment is no easy accomplishment. Teachers deal with large numbers of students, with each student having a unique neurological profile. Often the teacher needs to instruct to the average student. That is, they have to sense what the average rate of acquisition is in their student body. If a child learns more quickly, the teacher might provide some form of enrichment. If the child learns at a slower pace, significant complications can exist in both instructional practice and ability to find solutions for that child.

When I was conducting psycho-educational assessments, I found that the majority of children with learning disabilities struggled in classrooms not because of a reading disorder, but because of other types of learning disabilities. This may sound shocking as our interventions for children with learning disabilities had historically focused on reading remediation. The psycho-educational practice taught me that slow cognitive processing, weak memory for instructions and slow reasoning ability often resulted in the student’s academic difficulties. The combination of these neurological weaknesses meant that a student fell behind in class and could not understand what was going on, resulting in the student’s parents often needing to re-teach the subject or to hire a tutor.

Interestingly, many students in private schools for children with learning disabilities are placed in small classrooms and given multisensory instruction and compensation methods to improve their chance of understanding the curriculum, often in a modified program. This often works successfully, but only during the time that they attend these schools. Once students re-enter the regular education environment or move on to post-secondary education, these underlying neurological weaknesses reappear, making learning increasingly frustrating. In fact, these underlying neurological weaknesses with cognitive processing speed, memory for information and reasoning ability can also affect employment options.

A neurological intervention to improve these specific learning dysfunctions enables students to re-enter the regular education environment without the primary reasons for their academic difficulties; thus facilitating the acquisition of academic skills. A student with weak reasoning, or cause and effect understanding, works on brain exercises that increase the efficiency of this neurological function. The student who reads slowly, takes longer to get thoughts on paper or struggles to retain auditory information will work on brain exercises that increase the efficiency of these neurological functions. The Arrowsmith Program does not bypass these neurological weaknesses; rather, the Arrowsmith Program asks: why teach the majority of the curriculum until a student has the neurological capacity to actually learn and retain that material? The Eaton Arrowsmith School is, on average, a 3 to 4 year intervention program. Once students complete their neurological interventions, they re-enter the mainstream school without the need for accommodations or program modifications and ultimately have many more options regarding post-secondary education and employment opportunities.

2) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Specialists

The number of children diagnosed with ADHD is significant. When I was conducting psycho-educational assessments, roughly 30% of the children diagnosed with Learning Disabilities also had symptoms of ADHD. I would often refer them to a medical doctor that specialized in ADHD. The outcome was often the diagnosis of ADHD with intervention consisting of stimulant medication. For many children with the diagnosis of ADHD the results were positive. In fact, the medication helped them at school and home.

There were those cases where the medical doctor was unsure of the diagnosis of ADHD. As well, I would be puzzled as I was unsure as to whether the ADHD was the primary problem or a secondary result of the severity of the learning disability that was also diagnosed. For example, if one has trouble with written output and cannot listen to information without losing it in memory would one not exhibit ADHD-like behaviours?

Providing neurological remediation will help to determine if the ADHD symptoms are primary or secondary. Through the Arrowsmith Program a student can work on improving the underlying neurological weaknesses that are causing learning problems. Once these neurological weaknesses are moved to or close to the average range of functioning the signs of ADHD will either be eliminated altogether or remain constant. For example, many students who start the Arrowsmith Program while taking stimulant medication for ADHD are able to stop taking the medication within one to two years.

That is, they no longer need the stimulant medication as the ADHD cause was in fact the combination of their neurological weaknesses unrelated to attention. The child may have had neurological weaknesses with memory for information, visual-motor copying when printing or writing from the board and struggles with reasoning. Once these neurological functions are strengthened, the student no longer exhibits signs of attention related problems. It is also true that some of the children who come in with ADHD need to continue with stimulant medications even after Arrowsmith Program intervention. This is due to the fact that the ADHD is indeed a primary problem and not a result of a combination of other neurological weaknesses resulting in a learning disability. In cases such as this the ADHD stands alone and requires ongoing medical intervention.

Medical doctors, teachers, psychologists and parents can work with the Arrowsmith Program to determine if the ADHD diagnosis is a primary or secondary concern. Many children that are currently taking stimulant medication for ADHD may not require this form of intervention if indeed the cause of their ADHD symptoms is due to underlying neurological weaknesses related to a learning disability. This can be a wonderful partnership in order to determine the underlying causes of attention disorders in children.

3) Speech-Language Pathologists

Remediation of speech-language dysfunctions requires intensive and repetitive intervention. The Arrowsmith Program can be used both in tandem with, and/or as a foundation preparing a student for, work with a Speech-Language Pathologist. Through the use of specific and systematic interventions designed to target the weaker areas of the brain, the Arrowsmith Program can strengthen the cognitive abilities required for improvement in speech-language capacities. For example, the Arrowsmith Program can be utilized to improve a child’s ability to discriminate speech sounds. Additionally, this program can be used for children with weak memory for information and instructions, and for children who struggle to express ideas.

Children working in the Arrowsmith Program are required to work on cognitive exercises with high levels of active engagement, and need to master specific levels of difficulty in order to move these areas of cognitive weakness into the average range of functioning. The progress made by these students is constantly monitored by teachers in order to ensure that they are not using bypass strategies. (Use of a bypass strategy would enable the student to complete the exercise without targeting the area of weakness.) After a child has completed the Arrowsmith Program Speech-Language Pathologists can continue with further intervention to teach language skills.

4) Orton-Gillingham Tutoring

I was trained as an Orton-Gillingham Tutor during my graduate school training at Boston University. I took a summer course at the Kildonan School by Diana Hanbury King. I tutored at their summer camp, Camp Dunnabeck, and then at Fraser Academy in Vancouver. I also served on the BC Dyslexia Branch organizing conferences that often had an underlying focus on the Orton-Gillingham method.

I observed success using this method of reading and spelling intervention for the students I was tutoring. Nevertheless, there were some students who did not respond as well to the Orton-Gillingham method. Progress was slow for some students. I also recognized this when working with registered psychologists conducting psycho-educational assessments. Parents who had hired an Orton-Gillingham tutor for over two or three years were noticing slow progress. Of course, there were many cases where we saw significant progress, however, it was puzzling, even to private schools in the Vancouver area that use the Orton-Gillingham method, that some children with Dyslexia were not progressing using this method of reading and spelling intervention.

The Arrowsmith Program appreciates reading remediation programs as they are often necessary to help children to acquire the code of the English language. What is evident in the research conducted with the Arrowsmith Program is that some children with Dyslexia first need to improve the underlying neurological functions used to acquire reading and spelling skills. A student attending the Arrowsmith Program will spend hours on improving the cognitive area related to the ability to learn sound-symbol correspondence, automatic visual recognition and memory of symbols and ability to scan visual symbols. Thus, when it is time to introduce the sound/symbol system of the English language, using the Orton-Gillingham or Wilson Reading Program, the acquisition rate is much faster.

In summary, those using the Orton-Gillingham method should consider the Arrowsmith Program if the child they are working with is making slow or little progress. The child can then be referred back to an Orton-Gillingham tutor or school using this method once the neurological intervention has taken place. It is also clear that children with reading disorders often have multiple learning disabilities including such areas as written expression, reasoning, visual-motor integration and memory for information and instruction. If this is the case the Arrowsmith Program can assist in the areas that the Orton-Gillingham practitioner cannot offer assistance.

5) Occupational Therapist

Occupational Therapists know how important it is to improve the motor abilities of children with various learning disabilities. They spend countless hours assessing fine and gross motor abilities in children. The Arrowsmith Program can support Occupational Therapist by providing motor dysfunction remediation in children with learning disabilities before and/or during the child’s work with the Occupational Therapists. Errors in written expression such as miscopying, irregular spelling, careless written errors in mathematics, overall poor written performance and handwriting ability can be improved through Arrowsmith’s brain exercises, which target the motor systems of the brain. Specific cognitive exercises in the Arrowsmith Program suite can also improve gross motor and kinesthetic abilities such as body awareness in space and the recognition of objects by touch. Once the Arrowsmith Program is complete the Occupational Therapist can provide additional support in developing fine and gross motor abilities; thus, Occupational Therapists could recommend the Arrowsmith Program for the children they work with who require intensive intervention.

6) Social Skills Training Practitioners

Children with learning disabilities often struggle with social acceptance. Research highlights the fact that a majority of children with learning disabilities struggle to make friends, can be bullied and are often isolated from peers at school. As a result, self-esteem can be low and there can be an increase in possible psychological problems such as anxiety and depression. The need to improve social perception should not be understated.

To my knowledge, there are no programs that target brain areas involved in social perception in order to improve the child’s capacity to make sense of the world around them. Rather, the focus is on self-help groups or counselling with a therapist. We often tell the child to be proud of their strengths and realize that we all have weaknesses. We hope that this provides enough encouragement for the child to accept their differences and not take social rejection as heavily as they do. In some cases group therapy or individual counselling can help a child with a learning disability.

When I worked on conducting psycho-educational assessments I had many parents ask me what they could do to improve their child’s social skills. I often made recommendations to group therapy or individualized counselling. I mentioned that teaching their child to be a good self-advocate would also be beneficial. What I did not have available to me was a brain remediation program that focused on improving the underlying neurological weaknesses that caused the social skill deficits in the first place.

The Arrowsmith Program can in fact help counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists in these situations. The Arrowsmith Program is the only remediation system that offers the ability to improve the underlying neurological functions related to social perception. Children with social perception weaknesses have to work on brain exercises that make them interpret facial cues and social pragmatics along with the various social environments in which they are found. This builds the capacity of that child to both improve social perception and to increase social skills. The child can then better work with counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists. The ability to improve social perception is extremely important; the child who is unable to cope socially is at a significant disadvantage for a successful life outcome.

7) School Psychologists and Registered Psychologists

Psychologists spend countless hours meeting with teachers, parents and students. They have keen insights into why a child might be struggling at school. They are often knowledgeable about intelligence, cognitive ability and achievement skills. They are aware of the emotional disorders that can get in the way of successful school outcomes.

When a child is struggling in school the psychologist is asked to conduct a psycho-educational assessment. The psychologist will often first talk to the team of teachers working with that child, and also consult with the parent. The psycho-educational assessment often consists of measures of intelligence, cognitive ability and achievement skills. If the assessment shows discrepancies between ability (intelligence/cognitive levels) and achievement (reading, writing, spelling and math) then the identification of a learning disability may occur. The psychologist will then make recommendations to the school and parent.

When I was involved in conducting psycho-educational assessments, my primary goal after identification of a disability was to ensure the correct services were available to help that child succeed in school. I connected with the private schools in Vancouver that dealt directly with students with learning disabilities. I worked to gain an understanding of the speech-language and occupational therapy services available in town. I also got to know reading and math tutors and the variety of methods they used in order to help the children they were working with. For ADHD, it was key to know medical doctors that understood this condition and knew the various stimulant medications available. I also familiarized myself with those involved in providing natural supplements to improve attention control and with those involved in neurobiofeedback therapy for ADHD. It was key to fully understand the supports available. The parents found an assortment of success, partial-successes and no success with the variety of options I made available to them. What was apparent to me is that there was no one method that seemed to be the magic answer. Each child responded differently to the various intervention methods available to them. This makes sense, as each child’s brain is so uniquely different. We are really still learning how the brain responds to the variety of interventions available to them.

The Arrowsmith Program provides another remediation option to the variety of learning disabilities that exist. For example, when I assessed a child and found that he had a non-verbal learning disorder there were few options I could consider. This child would often struggle with mathematics, written expression and social perception. They also showed significant academic frustrations when they got to the higher grades where conceptual reasoning was more prominent. No longer could they trust their memory to do well on tests or exams. I could recommend a math tutor, use of a laptop and social skills training with group therapy. This provided some help. The Arrowsmith Program is the first available cognitive remediation program that improves the brain’s capacity to acquire math skills, get thoughts on paper fluently and to understand social interactions. As well, it provides the child with non-verbal learning disorders that capacity to reason efficiently, thereby improving math problem solving skills and reading comprehension. This is one example of a service that was not available to children with non-verbal learning disorders prior to the Arrowsmith Program’s arrival in Vancouver.

In addition, children with severe language impairments were often struggling to receive cognitive remediation. The Arrowsmith Program is the first program that I know of that address the underlying cognitive problems. Children can work on speech pronunciation weaknesses, oral language processing and memory, and expressive language deficits.

The Arrowsmith Program can also provide an intensive cognitive remediation program for children with visual-motor integration or motor symbol-sequencing deficits. These particular deficits can lead to written expression learning disabilities. Occupational therapists are well aware of the large number of children struggling in school due to these neurological deficits. In fact, research shows that this is the most common type of learning disorder in North America. Children with this disability require intensive and repetitive cognitive exercises that improve motor-symbol sequencing required for printing and copying. Interestingly, as the Arrowsmith Program points out, these children may also struggle with speech, careless errors in mathematics and can be slow readers. The Arrowsmith Program has discovered over the last 30 years that, through cognitive exercises, these learning functions can be improved.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the definition of a learning disability seems to exclude reasoning problems as a cause of a learning disability. The Learning Disability Association of Canada (LDAC) definition states that, “These disorders affect learning in individuals who otherwise demonstrate at least average abilities essential for thinking and/or reasoning.” What I have learned in conducting psycho-educational assessments is that many of these children diagnosed as having a learning disability showed significant reasoning problems. What LDAC was trying to state was that these children often have average intelligence. Intelligence is a different concept than reasoning, although LDAC appears to use the terms as one and the same. Reasoning deficits are clearly a significant issue for children with learning disabilities. Psychologists might see it on measures of intelligence such as Matrix Reasoning, or on the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Ability measure of Fluid Reasoning or Conceptual Reasoning. Again, for the first time in Vancouver children with reasoning deficits can receive the necessary cognitive remediation through the Arrowsmith Program, thereby improving their capacity to reason. Cause and effect problem solving becomes more fluent and accurate. In turn, achievement areas such as reading comprehension and math problem solving improve without direct instruction and without tutoring or the use of workbooks on reading comprehension or math problem solving.

When I was conducting psycho-educational assessments these cognitive remediation services were not available to my clients. The Arrowsmith Program now is available in Vancouver, so that children struggling with these particular learning disability subtypes can receive the intensive remediation they so badly need.

Summary

The Arrowsmith Program can assist a number of educational and medical professionals that work with children with learning disabilities and attention disorders. Professionals who have worked with Arrowsmith students have found that, as students’ capacities increased, learning occurred at a more rapid pace and was a more rewarding experience. The focus of the Arrowsmith Program is on identifying specific neurological weaknesses and remediating them through brain exercises. This improvement in neurological functioning can then improve the intervention delivered by other professionals working with children struggling in school.

Reflections on 17th National Conference On Learning Disabilities

October 6th, 2009

Dear Friends and Professionals:

On September 25th, 2009, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at the 17th National Learning Disabilities Conference in Whitehorse. I was invited to speak on the topic of neuroplasticity and learning disabilities. This was the first ever talk about the impact of brain plasticity findings on the field of Learning Disabilities at a national conference in Canada. Psychologists, principals, teachers and parents were present, as were representatives from Learning Disabilities Associations throughout Canada, including the Learning Disabilities Association of Saskatchewan, which is now offering the Arrowsmith Program in their facility.

I began my presentation discussing how the field of Learning Disabilities has focused on reading difficulties. For decades, the focus of remediation and intervention has been on reading and spelling; thus, research funding and practice have focused in on this area of academic achievement. While it is true that there are many children who have reading-based learning disabilities, this focus means that the other types of learning disabilities that impact school, such as written expression and mathematics, are forgotten. In fact, the schools for children with learning disabilities in BC focus exclusively on reading and spelling intervention. As a result, thousands of children in BC are not being given appropriate cognitive intervention. For example, written expression learning disabilities are the most common type of learning disability. There is little support for children with written expression disorders, other than the use of assistive technology such as a laptop or scribe to bypass their learning problems. Additionally, math-based learning disabilities are another common type of problem for children. There is little cognitive intervention or support, other than extra tutoring and allowing these students to use a calculator. Also, approximately 65% to 80% of children with learning disabilities struggle with social perception. Again, little cognitive intervention is available to help children with this neurological difficulty. Finally, reasoning and critical thinking learning disorders are common for children, and there is no cognitive intervention for children with these learning problems. Those listening to my presentation recognized that this is true in schools today – that the focus has been on reading and spelling intervention and that children with other types of learning problems seldom get the help they so desperately need.

The Arrowsmith Program is the first cognitive remediation system that addresses multiple types of learning disabilities. This was a surprise to many who listened to my presentation, who had looked at the Arrowsmith Program solely as a reading intervention, similar to the programs they had been using for years. For many, this was the first time that they had fully recognized the broad scope and potential of the Arrowsmith program. The fact that the Arrowsmith Program addresses reading, math, written expression, reasoning, memory, spatial thinking, social perception, attention, planning and organization was a novel idea to them.

The Arrowsmith Program, founded on neuroscientific research, involves intensive and graduated mental exercises that are designed to strengthen the underlying weak cognitive capacities that are the source of the learning disabilities. Over 30 years of experience has demonstrated that these affected brain areas can be improved through mental exercises, resulting in increased mental capacities and strengthened learning abilities. Underfunctioning areas of the brain are treated like weak muscles and are intensely stimulated through mental exercises to produce strengthened learning capacities. Research at Arrowsmith School has also shown that when the deficient area is improved, the individual’s ability to perform complex tasks such as reading or writing also improves.

The Arrowsmith Program has conducted research showing positive results of the program, and we are excited about the possibility of more research. I believe that this research will be ongoing and will last more than my life time. I hope that educational researchers and policy makers will embrace the contributions from the field of neuroscience and capitalize on scientists’ abilities to measure the brain during learning activities, thereby enabling educational researchers to measure programs and interventions for students with learning disabilities in a new way. For example, many currently-used reading intervention programs, which have been helpful for many children, lack conclusive empirical evidence on their effectiveness – a finding that was somewhat shocking to many of those listening to my presentation, who had believed that these reading intervention methods had been proven by rigorous scientific study. By recognizing the relationship that neuroscientists and educators can have, new measures can be used to investigate claims made about intervention methods currently being promoted, which may have limited empirical evidence behind them. In short, all of us involved in the education of children with learning disabilities need to continue improving our programs through rigorous scientific research.

Recently, an awareness of how important the relationship between education and neuroscience has resulted in the formation of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society . One of their mandates is to bridge the gap between education and neuroscience. Current research published in Mind, Brain and Education Journal in March 2009, in an article entitled How Many Brains Does It Take to Build a Scientific Groundwork for Learning and Teaching, investigated the challenges of bringing both educators and neuroscientists together for the common purpose of improving educational practice, stating:

Some educational researchers seemed to perceive neuroscience research as a potential threat to principles about learning established by social science research, which they had built their careers on. Furthermore, only a few education policy makers accepted invitations to our meetings, possibly because some of them were intimidated by arcane neuroscience and some of them saw a political danger related to the concerns of educational researchers. Namely, that education had thus far always used the social sciences (psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc) as reference disciplines and they feared that these disciplines would suddenly be neglected and replaced by neuroscience (p 21).

Despite these challenges, many educators and policy-makers understand that, through advances in neuroscience, great progress in educational methods can be made. Advances in neuroscience increase our understanding of how to create and apply educational methods in order to better serve all students.

The final remarks in my presentation referred to the definition of learning disabilities, which states that a learning disability is lifelong. We are observing through the Arrowsmith Program that this does not always need to be the case. Some children who have completed the Arrowsmith Program are no longer classified as having a learning disability in subsequent psycho-educational assessments. This is due to the fact that their cognitive functions and achievement abilities have improved to the point that there is no longer a significant discrepancy between cognitive/intellectual ability and achievement. Thus, the statement that a learning disability is lifelong needs to be questioned with the brain’s ability to change itself.

In closing, I was grateful for the chance to speak at the 17th National Conference on Learning Disabilities. It is exciting to see the Learning Disabilities Associations throughout Canada interested in implementing the Arrowsmith Program. The success of the LDA Saskatchewan Arrowsmith Program is helping the other associations realize what is possible for children with these broad and diverse disabilities. I hope that educational researchers and policy makers will feel inspired by recent research in neuroscience, and visit Arrowsmith schools to witness for themselves the program in action. The Arrowsmith Program is the first intervention program that has utilized both education practice and neuroscience theory to provide comprehensive brain remediation for children with learning disabilities. It is my belief that so much that can be learned by the combined efforts of educators and neuroscientists, and it is my hope that a continued dialogue will further efforts to advance the field of Learning Disabilities.

Sincerely,

Howard Eaton, Ed.M.

Mayes, S.D., & Calhoun, S.L. (2008) Challenging the Assumptions About the Frequency and Coexistence of Learning Disability Types. School Psychology International, 28, 437-448.

http://www.arrowsmithschool.org/research.htm

Florida Centre for Reading Research: Orton-Gillingham Approach http://www.fcrr.org/FCRRreports/PDF/Orton_Gillingham_Approach.pdf
Florida Centre for Reading Research: Wilson Reading System – http://www.fcrr.org/FCRRReports/PDF/wilson.pdf

http://www.imbes.org/

Chiesa, B., Christoph, V., & Hinton, C. (2009) How Many Brains Does It Take to Build a New Light: Knowledge Management Challenges of a Transdisciplinary Project. Mind, Brain, and Education, 3, 17-26.

Improving Fluid Reasoning/Intelligence

There are times in our lives that we wish we could go back in history and apologize for our mistakes either as a parent or as a teacher.   The Arrowsmith Program, created by Barbara Young, often makes me reflect on the students I have worked with in the past and how much they would have benefited from her program.  Here is just one example of a brain exercise created by Ms. Young many years ago and how it relates to new findings from neuroscience.

For the last 30 years Ms. Young has used the Clocks brain exercise to develop the reasoning abilities of children with learning disabilities.  This brain exercise improves various achievement abilities (reading comprehension and math problem solving) and overall school success.   I have observed reasoning and intelligence measures improve significantly after the Clocks exercise has been completed within the Arrowsmith Program.  Updated psycho-educational assessments show sharp improvements in fluid reasoning and perceptual reasoning abilities of children who have completed the Clocks exercise.  Research in neuroscience, as described below, indirectly highlights some of the reasons why this might be happening.

In 1992, I was a first year Special Education teacher in the small town of Truro, Massachusetts.  I recall telling parents at Individual Educational Program meetings not to worry if their child could not read a clock face.  These parents would come visit my classroom and say, “Sarah can’t tell time and she is in Grade 4.  I am really worried about this.  She has been trying to learn to tell time for 4 years and can’t get it.”  I often said, “don’t worry about it – there are digital watches now.”

I now realize that reading a clock face is an important indicator of a child’s ability to understand multiple concepts and to improve reasoning abilities.  A concept is a general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences.   The clock face is quite abstract and requires a number of concepts to be understood (such as a 24 hour day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute and the knowledge that the hands of a clock face signify a placement in time that is constantly moving forward).  Of course, there are other concepts, such as before and after, that need to be understood when reading a clock.  What is critical for the child is that all of these concepts need to converge into the ability to look at a clock and tell the time.  If the child is struggling to analyze the relationships of all these concepts, it often means they will also struggle with reading comprehension and math problem solving, as these achievement abilities also require the ability to analyze and synthesize a number of concepts simultaneously.

Back in 1992, I was telling parents that these concepts were not important to learn, as their child could simply wear a digital wrist watch; in other words, a child could bypass this problem by using technology or an accommodation (i.e. someone else could tell them the time).  I was also not giving the child the chance to build brain capacities to understand multiple concepts and improving general reasoning ability.  I should have been trying to teach the child how to tell time on a clock face with significant repetition and review.

Current research in neuroscience is indirectly linking the ability to draw and/or imagine clock faces to the location in the brain responsible for this activity.  It is even more fascinating that this is the same region of the brain that differentiates average reasoners from superior reasoners.

In Germany, at the Departments of Neurology and Neuroradiology at the Klinikum der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt, the areas of the brain used to imagine clocks were identified by researchers. Luigi Trojano and his colleagues were interested in finding out which area of the brain was involved in spatial analysis when no visual stimulus was present. Their findings were published in Cerebral Cortex (May 2000), which is published by Oxford University Press. These researchers studied seven right-handed post-graduate students ages 23 to 32. The subjects were asked to imagine two analogue clock faces based on times presented to them verbally by the examiner. As they were doing this visual imaging, their brains were being scanned. These researchers noted: “The most striking results of our two experiments demonstrated that cortical activation (as measured by an increase of the fMRI BOLD signal) during the mental clock test was the most prominent in the posterior parietal lobes of both hemispheres.” I will get back to why the activation of the posterial parietal cortex is so important in relationship to the Clocks exercise used with the Arrowsmith Program.

In Japan, at the Department of Neurology and Department of Radiology, Rakuwakai-Otowa Hospital in Kyoto, the areas of the brain that are most activated during the drawings of clocks were identified. Dr. Tadashi Ino and his colleagues studied 18 right-handed volunteers as they drew the hands of a clock while undergoing fMRI. Their findings were published in the journal Neuroscience Research in January of 2003. They discovered that the brain utilized numerous neurological pathways for drawing a clock; however, the most strongly activated areas during clock drawing were the posterial parietal cortex and the dorsal premotor area. The evidence from fMRIs points to the posterial parietal cortex as being a primary cortical location for tasks involved in clocks – whether drawing or imagining.

So, what is the big deal? Here is the connection between using clocks for a brain exercise and the development of reasoning. In 2005, the journal Neuroimage published a research article on intelligence and which specific neural pathways may be involved in reasoning. The research had been conducted in South Korea at the Seoul National University. Various departments were involved, including the School of Biological Sciences, Department of Biology Education. Additionally, the Korea Institute of Brain Science and Department of Psychiatry at the Catholic University in Seoul were also involved. Finally, Yale University and the Department of Psychology were also a part of the study. The lead researcher was Dr. Kun Ho Lee from the School of Biological Sciences at the Seoul National University.

Dr. Lee noted in his study that the parietal, and later prefrontal, cortices have been noted by other researchers as playing a role in fluid reasoning, the control of attention, and working memory. Dr. Lee and his colleagues wanted to discover the brain location for fluid reasoning of intellectually gifted adolescent students. Could they discover the brain region or pathway that was responsible for general intelligence? Dr. Lee studied 36 gifted adolescents from Busan, Korea. Busan is the largest port city in South Korea and is located at the southereastern most tip of the country. It has a population of over 3.6 million and is known as the capital of baseball in South Korea. The 36 gifted adolescent students were from the National Academy of Gifted Adolescents. The students were given the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale – Revised (Korean version) and the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), which is a standard test for general fluid intelligence. The control group were students from a local high school.

The experimental and control groups were then given fMRI tasks related to reasoning. The students would be placed in the fMRI machine and asked to perform these specific tasks that had increasing levels of reasoning complexity. As they were performing these tasks, the fMRI showed their brain activity, which was being recorded by the researchers. What was their main finding? Dr. Lee and his colleagues wrote: “The main finding of the current study emphasized the role of the posterial parietal region (specifically, bilateral SPL and right IPS (BA 7/40) among the entire network components of g [general intelligence].” The students with the higher levels of intelligence showed greater activation of the posterial parietal regions as the complexity of the reasoning tasks increased. They continued, restating, “In addition, our results demonstrated that the posterior parietal regions including bilateral SPL and right IPS could be the neural correlates for superior general intelligence. These findings would be the early step toward the development of biological measures of g [general intelligence] which leads to new perspectives for behaviour interventions improving general cognitive ability”.

It is important to note that the prefrontal lobes of these students were also activated. There is a specific frontal-parietal relationship, due to the fact that the brain has to think, which is a prefrontal or executive function task. Interestingly, as students become more adept at the various levels of reasoning, the prefrontal activity decreased.

This research, and the findings from the implementation of the Arrowsmith Program at the Eaton Arrowsmith School, highlight how important it is not to ignore the importance of teaching children how to read a clock face. The ability to read a clock face is one of the first indicators of a child’s reasoning capacities and can predict whether long-term educational frustrations might be developing. We have also learned that reasoning can improve dramatically in children with learning disabilities. Children’s reasoning abilities are not fixed, they can change.

Trojan, L., Grossi, Dario., Linden, E.J., Formisano, E., Hacker, H., Zanella, E.F., Goebel, R., Di Salle, D., 2000. Matching Two Imagined Clocks: the Functional Anatomy of Spatial Analysis in the Absence of Visual Stimulation. Cerebral Cortex. 10, 473-481.

Ino, T., Asada, T., Ito, J., Kimura, T., Fukuyama, H., 2002. Parieto-frontal networks for clock drawing revealed with fMRI. Neuroscience Research. 45, 71-77.

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A New Direction

Educators need to open their awareness to studies on the human brain highlighting neurological findings regarding the plasticity of the brain.  It is becoming more apparent that the human brain can improve cognitive capacities through intensive and repetitive cognitive exercises.  If this is possible, children with learning difficulties can begin to improve their cognitive weaknesses that result in school frustrations rather than bypassing them through accommodations or learning strategies.  We are discovering this fact at the Eaton Arrowsmith School. The graduates of the program (Arrowsmith Program) are not requiring all the accommodations and extra support that they previously needed once they transition back into the regular public or private school system.  As well, the founder of the Arrowsmith Program, Barbara Young, has noted this fact for the past 30 years at her school in Toronto.

It is critical that education professors, teachers and researchers begin to incorporate findings of neuroscience into their daily work.  Unfortunately, this is not easy to do, as shifts in thinking can take time due to another fact about the brain.  That is, the brain can get hardwired due to the realities of neuroplasticity.  In other words, the more you think one way, the more difficult it is for the brain to create new neural networks to open the mind to new concepts.  Thinking one way becomes ingrained in the brain, creating a path that is so strong, that deviations from this form of thought is difficult.  In order to change something remarkable or stunning needs to take place, to alter this path of thinking.

Over the next month I will be adding information to this blog that I hope creates this new direction in thinking about the possibilities of the brain and how this can change the field of Learning Disabilities and/or ADHD.