Hello there,
I am interested in finding out more about your program for my son. He is 10 years old and has been diagnosed with learning disabilities, which include poor phonological awareness. I am looking into options to specifically address this, and any information would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Jennifer
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Dear Jennifer
Thank you for contacting Edublox. I trust that my answer will be helpful.
Edublox addresses multiple cognitive skills rather than specific cognitive abilities. There are four reasons why the best solution for learning disabilities is to follow a balanced and holistic approach and develop multiple cognitive skills, and not only some:
Correlation does not equal cause and effect
Researchers have known that weak cognitive skills are the predominant cause of learning disabilities for over a century, but are still unsure which cognitive skills are responsible. For example, in addition to phonemic awareness, cognitive psychology has linked the following brain-based skills to dyslexia: verbal fluency; attention and executive functions; visual attention; visuospatial abilities; processing speed; short-term memory; auditory working memory; visual and visual sequential memory; visual long-term memory, especially for details; verbal long-term memory; and rapid naming, which concerns retrieval from long-term memory.
Researchers face this challenge: two things that are linked or correlated do not equal cause and effect. The following, for example, demonstrates a correlation with an incorrect conclusion:
When ice cream sales are high, the frequency of shark attacks increases.
Therefore, sharks attack in response to rising ice cream sales.
These two things are merely correlated and not cause and effect. The two variables exhibit a common trait — the warm season — when people are more likely to eat ice cream and swim in the ocean. Yet, it’s easy to confuse correlation with causation when relying solely on observational data.
Until we have completely mapped the cognitive deficits that cause learning disabilities, addressing multiple cognitive skills is much less of a gamble than addressing only one or two.
Overtraining one area may come at a cost
Overtraining one body part can cause deformity, such as Popeye syndrome, when overtraining the biceps. The same principle seems to apply to the brain. Strengthening only one or two selected brain areas may weaken other brain areas. In Maguire et al.’s 2006 experiment with London taxi drivers, growth in the brain occurred in the posterior hippocampi. This resulted from the taxi drivers having to memorize lots of locations, including roughly 25,000 city streets. However, this seems to have come at a cost, as they had reduced anterior hippocampal gray matter volume (Maguire, Woollett & Spiers, 2006).
Cognitive abilities mutually facilitate growth
One should consider the role of mutualism. A mutualistic view suggests that cognitive abilities mutually facilitate growth. For example, better reasoning skills allow individuals to improve their vocabulary more quickly, and better vocabularies are associated with faster improvement in reasoning ability (Kievit et al., 2017).
The need to build brain connectivity
Scientists have argued for decades that there are specific brain regions that predict having a particular learning disorder or difficulty. Still, a study by Siugzdaite et al. (2020) shows this isn’t the whole truth. The researchers studied close to 500 children and found that the brain differences did not map onto any labels the children had been given — in other words, there were no brain regions that predicted having ASD or ADHD, for example. More surprisingly, they found that the different brain regions did not even predict specific cognitive difficulties — there was no particular brain deficit for language problems or memory difficulties, for example.
Instead, the team found that the children’s brains were organized around hubs, like an efficient traffic system or social network. Children with well-connected brain hubs had very specific cognitive difficulties, such as poor listening skills, or had no cognitive difficulties. By contrast, children with poorly connected hubs — like a train station with few or poor connections — had widespread and severe cognitive problems
So, unless the learning difficulty is very specific and minuscule, addressing multiple cognitive skills is the way forward, as this approach will build brain connectivity.
Jennifer, feel welcome to book a free consultation to further discuss your child’s needs.
Regards,
Sue
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References:
Kievit, R. A., Lindenberger, U., Goodyer, I. M., Jones, P. B., Fonagy, P., Bullmore, E. T., & Dolan, R. J. (2017). Mutualistic coupling between vocabulary and reasoning supports cognitive development during late adolescence and early adulthood. Psychological Science, 28(10), 1419-1431.
Maguire, E. A., Woollett, K., & Spiers, H. J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis London taxi drivers and bus drivers. Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091-1101.
Siugzdaite, R., Bathelt, J., Holmes, J., & Astle, D. E.(2020). Transdiagnostic brain mapping in developmental disorders. Current Biology, 30(7), 1245-1257.
More about Sue
Sue is an educational specialist in learning problems and dyslexia and has a B.A. Honors in Psychology and B.D. degree. Early in her professional career, Sue was instrumental in training over 3,000 teachers and tutors, providing them with the foundational and practical understanding to facilitate cognitive development among children who struggle to read and write. With over 30 years of research to her name, Sue conceptualized the Edublox teaching and learning methods that have helped thousands of children who were struggling to read, learn and achieve. In 2007, she opened the first Edublox reading and learning clinic, and now there are 30 Edublox clinics internationally. Her proudest moments are when she sees a child who had severe learning difficulties come top of their class after one or two years at Edublox. Sue always takes time to collect the ‘hero’ stories of students whose self-esteem is lifted as their marks improve.
