What will the presentation be about?
Attendees will have a fuller understanding of reading and learning difficulties, what to look for, the relationship to cognitive skills, understanding education psychologist reports and implementing solutions to the identified needs:

I just read a report from the Everett, Massachusetts school district that illustrates what CAN be achieved in helping children catch up, in a very short time. Everett is a north-Boston suburb that was once rated as a top Massachusetts district, but a change in its demographics over the past 40 years has greatly increased the challenges that it faces. 55 languages are now represented in its approximately 6,000 students; 44% of its children are ELLs. A large proportion of its students are from low SES households.

If you've been involved in the field of education for any length of time, you've seen many innovations and programs come and go. Teaching machines, Time on Task programs, Epstein's plateaus of adolescent cognition, and Madeline Hunter's Elements of Effective Instruction are just a few of the programs that at one time garnered many adherents only to fade into near obscurity several years later. The pendulum swings are so frequent in schools that many educators have adopted a "sit tight, this too will pass" attitude.

The newest "breakthrough" in education is neuroscience or brain research, a field that until recently has been foreign to educators. While many past programs generated a great deal of interest, rarely has one amassed a following so enthusiastic as this one. In the past few years, numerous national educational conference have been devoted entirely to the brain. Some mention of brain research has become de rigueur in grant proposals and staff development plans.

The learning disability dyslexia may be the result of different neurological conditions in readers of dissimilar languages, according to a new study that compared readers of English to those of Chinese (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online, April 7, 2008).

Previous neuroimaging studies revealed that dyslexic readers of alphabetic languages like English have decreased gray matter volume and weak reading-related activity in posterior regions of the brain compared to readers of character-based languages.

Li-Hai Tan, PhD and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong studied Chinese children with dyslexia to assess whether these abnormalities were universal. Using two imaging techniques, voxel-based morphometry, which assesses brain volume, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers discovered that readers of Chinese, a logographic, character-based language, had impairments in different brain regions than readers of alphabetic languages.

Specifically, Chinese children with dyslexia had structural and functional deficits in the left-middle frontal gyrus region, which is important for the coordination of cognitive resources in working memory, while their more posterior brain systems remained unaffected.

The authors suggested that the research may help physicians tailor therapies for the approximately 17 percent of schoolchildren affected by dyslexia worldwide.