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.

Learning How To Read A Clock Face

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.

Lee, K.H., Choi, Y.Y., Gray, J.R., Cho, S.H., Chae, J., Lee, S., Kim, K., 2005. Neural correlates of superior intelligence: Stronger recruitment of posterior parietal cortex. Neuroimage 29: 578-586.

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.

Focus of Blog

This blog focuses on topics related to neuroplasticity, brain training, education, learning disabilities and attention disorders.  A primary interest for this blog will be on topics related to neuroplasticity and learning difficulties in children and adults.  If you are interested in being informed on these issues please take part in this blogs activity.  I look forward to adding articles, opinions, research to this blog and responding to questions or insights from readers.