Nankids

If anyone is looking for an Orton-Gillingham tutor, I am available now and over the summer to work either in person or remotely to work on decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, math, penmanship, written comprehension, and executive functioning. Formerly with The Schenck School, I have helped remediate children into becoming successful in school. I also work around summer plans and vacations. Imagine the convenience of your child being able to walk over to my home office.
Nancy Lindenbaum
678-755-7430

Too Soon to Declare Handwriting a Relic of the Past

Although many assume handwriting instruction is no longer needed now that we have computers, research across disciplines demonstrates the importance of teaching handwriting. Advantages of handwriting during note-taking have been found in adolescents and young adults. At the same time, there are benefits to teaching computer skills and not simply recommending them as an accommodation. Instead of leaving handwriting behind, we should be developing hybrid writers who can produce legible manuscript and cursive handwriting in addition to using a variety of computer tools for various writing and reading purposes. See The New York Times article—"What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades"—and Dr. Virginia Berninger’s letter to The New York Times editor for some timely and thought-provoking information.

Professor Virginia Berninger, who co-authored the IDA Fact Sheet on Dysgraphia with Beverly Wolf, and Professor Todd Richards, her collaborator in brain imaging, have written the letter below to the NY Times requesting correction of factual errors about their research at the University of Washington on dysgraphia and handwriting. Despite their requests, as of the date of this June 2014 issue of the IDA Examiner, the NY Times had not published their letter correcting misinformation about dysgraphia and handwriting. At the request of the editors of the IDA Examiner, Dr. Berninger has provided this letter aimed at correcting the factual errors. Below the letter are references for two papers Dr. Berninger was invited to write following the National Handwriting Summit in 2012; these papers accurately portray the research-supported views of Dr. Berninger and Dr. Richards. [Email [email protected] for published papers.]

June 12, 2014
Please print this letter to correct factual errors in “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” by Maria Konnikova, June 2, 2104, regarding NICHD-funded University of Washington writing research.

First, dysgraphia is not the result of brain injury. It is a developmental handwriting disorder that can affect spelling and composing. Katusic and Colligan’s groundbreaking research at the Mayo Clinic shows that about one in six school-age children has a specific learning disability (SLD) in written expression, of which dysgraphia is one cause.

Second, we never reported evidence that printing, cursive, and keyboarding have distinct brain pathways. Rather, brain imaging studies identified differences between 5th grade students with and without dysgraphia during idea generation, spelling, novel and familiar letter formation, and finger sequencing. Printing the alphabet (sequencing component strokes), spelling (sequencing letters), and composing (sequencing words) outside the scanner were correlated with five brain regions during finger sequencing.

Third, we never claimed that cursive writing is better than printing or keyboarding. Rather, our research supports creating hybrid writers with expertise in printing (transfers to format most often encountered in written texts), cursive (links letters into word units and may speed up writing), and keyboarding (used in word processing). Steve Jobs, an accomplished calligrapher before making seminal contributions to developing laptop computers with multiple manuscript and cursive font styles, exemplifies the contributions of hybrid writers.

Fourth, although elementary school children composed longer texts faster with more ideas in handwriting than by keyboard, their parents reported computers were used for homework rather than in classroom instruction. Our current research shows value in combining writing by pen and computers in implementing evidence-based writing instruction for letter production, spelling, and composing.

Fifth, educational policy specialists, not classroom educators, authored the Common Core State Standards and included handwriting only in kindergarten and first grade. When teachers’ jobs depend on students’ scores on high stakes tests linked to Common Core State Standards, if a skill is not tested, it often is not taught. Hopefully, researcher-educator partnerships can inform future Common Core State Standards guidelines for early identification of weak handwriting, and provision of evidence-based handwriting, spelling, and composing instruction by pen and keyboard across the grades as the curriculum requirements increase and the nature of writing demands changes as shown by the Spencer LifeSpan Writing group headed by Bazerman.

Sincerely,

Virginia W. Berninger, Ph.D., and Todd L. Richards, Ph.D., University of Washington

To read the full NY Times article, click here.

March 2014

Faulty Access and Not Representation of Phonemes in Dyslexia? New Scientific Evidence Sheds Light on the Debate

By: Fumiko Hoeft MD PhD, UCSF

A study published recently may shed light on the long-held debate of whether "representation" of phonemes (i.e., individual sound-segments such as the /g/ in ) and/or "access" to this representation is impaired in people with dyslexia (Boets et all., 2013). Studies such as these help inform development of neuro-scientific evidence-based and targeted inventions.

In this study, using neuroimaging technology, researchers investigated 23 adults severely affected by dyslexia and 22 adults without dyslexia. They found that the connection between left hemisphere regions that are important for processing speech sounds and speech output was impaired in people with dyslexia. They also applied machine-learning algorithms often used to optimize online search engines and to decode handwritten characters. Using these algorithms, they observed brain activation patterns in response to different types of speech sounds in adults with and without dyslexia. The researchers did not find differences in brain activation patterns in the accuracy of the algorithm between adults with and without dyslexia. This was in striking contrast to the connection impairment found in these adults with dyslexia. Based on these results, they concluded that it could be the access to phonemes that is impaired in dyslexia (based on connection impairment) and not the phoneme representation itself (based on no differences in brain activation).

The finding that the left hemisphere phonological pathway is impaired in dyslexia is not news. There have been a number of reports suggesting that the connection between these two regions, unique to humans, is important for word learning and is disrupted in poor readers (e.g., Lopez-Barroso et all., 2013; Simos, Rezaie, Fletcher, & Papanicolaou, 2013; Yeatman, Dougherty, Ben-Shachar, & Wandell, 2012). Interestingly, in children with dyslexia, the right hemisphere equivalent of this connection has been shown to predict reading outcome, consistent with the idea that the right hemisphere is used to compensate for faulty left hemisphere reading networks (Hoeft et all., 2011).

What makes the current study particularly innovative is the attempt to resolve conflicting theories about the root causes of the disorder, phoneme representation versus access, by combining different neuroimaging modalities and applying a number of the latest analytical approaches. Boets and colleagues used functional MRI (fMRI) to assess brain activation patterns during phoneme processing and combined it with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to assess white matter structures required to access this representation. Research combining different neuroimaging modalities and analytical techniques in this way is becoming increasingly popular for examining more complex problems, as in the current study. Despite employing highly sensitive methods, researchers found no indication that the neural representation of phonemes was abnormal in people with dyslexia.

Their finding provides the most convincing evidence to date on the debate. There are several caveats, however, that are pointed out by the authors themselves in the published report. First, it is always tricky to prove that no significant difference between groups equates to evidence that the two groups are the same. There are many reasons why researchers may not find significant results (i.e., the lack of evidence for impairment in phoneme representations in the current study). For example, too few data-points (participants), variability among measures used, and use of probes or neuroimaging measures that are not appropriate for the question at hand can all lead to null findings. Indeed, there are many studies that have found impairment in phoneme representation in dyslexia (e.g., Perrachione, Del Tufo, & Gabrieli, 2011). Further, a recent study using an electrocorticogram (ECoG), a neural recording device placed directly on the surfaces of brains as part of epilepsy surgery, showed that the brain does not respond to each phoneme but is instead highly sensitive to detecting simpler elements, known as phonetic features (Mesgarani, Cheung, Johnson, & Chang, 2014). Mesganari and colleagues found that the brain has a systematic organization for these basic sound feature units, akin to elements in the periodic table. It may be that these phonetic feature representations are impaired in those with dyslexia. Finally, studies of children, including very young children prior to a diagnosis of dyslexia, will be interesting to investigate.

Hence, while the current study provides some solid evidence, the jury is still out. One approach that will provide further evidence is a multilevel approach using the measures used here in addition to genetic (e.g. Poelmans, Buitelaar, Pauls, & Franke, 2011), neurochemical (e.g., Pugh et al., 2014), and oscillatory (e.g., Lehongre, Ramus, Villiermet, Schwartz, & Giraud, 2011) measures across the life-span and in cross-linguistic contexts. Regardless, the study by Boets et al. (2014) is a large step towards furthering our understanding of the root causes of dyslexia.
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