Why Behavioral Checklists for ADHD and Autism Stink

More reasons to believe that behavioral checklists are a lousy way to diagnose ADHD and Autism- two recent studies have now found that perinatal stress (or mild birth injury by implication) greatly increases the likelihood a child will be diagnosed with ADHD or Autism. Hmmm - is this a coincidence? Probably not. Both ADHD and Autism use cafeteria-style checklists to diagnose children, and the overwhelming number of children are never examined by a neurologist who might detect specific patterns of neurologic disability that suggest an injury from birth.

Does it matter? Absolutely. As it turns out there are many different ways in the brain that a little patchey injury can cause unwanted behaviors like hyperactivity, inattentiveness, poor eye contact, or poor social interactions, but many differences as well. And its these differences that require different interventions and recommendations as well as resulting in very different outcomes. The problem today is there is so much that is getting lumped under the ADHD and Autism diagnoses (or Aspergers or PDD-NOS) that inappropriate placement and educational decisions, and even parenting decisions are made.

Both research reports are available as full text below.

The ADHD study looked at risk factors within families - so comparing children to unaffected family siblings - and this was a good idea. ADHD was highly associated with neonatal complications (p < 0.006) and in addition it also correlated with significantly higher mean scores on the total CBCL (72.0 vs. 66.4). Neonatal problems were also associated with higher externalizing scores - including impulsivity, and poor performance on the CPT. Specific neonatal risks were seen with NICU hospitalization, oxygen therapy, general anesthesia, and surgery.

The Autism Report saw lots of perinatal risk factors again - being premature resulted in a 2.5x increased risk of autism, low Apgars (birth stress, poor breathing) was almost 2x an increased risk of autism, breech birth 1.6x increased risk, and parental psychosis 3.4x increased risk for autism.

Do these look like a single thing to you?

Risk Factors for ADHD
Risk Factors for Autism Res Paper
WebMD article autism
PsycPORT.com autism article

Creativity as an Elusive Factor in Giftedness

We found this nice article by Joyce VanTassel-Baska. And it looks like we will be giving a presentation on Problem Solving and Creativity in Gifted Students for the NAGC meeting in Kentucky in November. Should be fun!

Joyce makes a number of good points, including a remark about how "too much conventional learning in an area where the ideas of others become so crystallized as to block innovative thinking in the domain." She adds "There is also evidence that much of the learning of high creatives is obtained independently of traditional schooling. Autodidacticism may be the norm among this group where the impetus, nature, and extent of learning is self-governed."

Creativity as an Elusive Factor in Giftedness

Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE

If you like considering back-and-forth debate, check out the Edge as it takes on Science and Gender.

GENDER AND SCIENCE

The Power of Analogical Thinking

"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have." - Samuel Butler

Analogical thinking is well recognized for its importance in higher level creative thinking and successful problem solving, but it receives little formal consideration in conventional school curricula. We would even like to see it employed more in e-learning situations or the video gaming industry especially they may be the most common shared experience of young people (but that's for another post...).

In the study below, researchers visualized the difference between semantically and analogically related words, and it is a remarkabledifference. The green below indicates areas of brain activated when subjects see semantically related words like 'note' and 'scale' and 'rain' and 'drought', but look at how much brain and how many more areas get activated with analogous words like 'bouquet' and 'flower' and 'chain' and 'link'(analogy in red, common areas in yellow).



Analogy is properly the domain of higher order thought because it requires fluency - lots of ideas - and integration across multiple representations. Analogy is also more simply thought of as flexible pattern recognition, the process involved in all those good things that should be emphasized in education - critical thinking and deduction, inference, and solutions by insight.

Analogical Reasoning

Speed Reading in Adult Dyslexics

It was great to see more research on this clinical phenomena we have seen for quite a while - the "Faster is Better" paradox for well-compensated or gifted dyslexics. Since 1997, research studies have documented the "acceleration phenomenon" in which dyslexics made to read 10-20% faster than their 'routine' reading rate could markedly increase their decoding accuracy and comprehension.

Most of the dyslexic lawyers and professionals we know have discovered this (as well as many younger gifted dyslexics) - but at last there are more studies dissecting out why this happens. The link below takes you to the research paper which is a bit technical, but it relates many nice points. Among them:

- "There is growing support for th notion that word reading fluency may reflect sub-processes other than phonology and can thus be conceptualized as a separate factor for the reading deficit."
- "...reading intervention studies have also indicated that while intensive training in phonemic awareness could improve decoding and word identification in poor readers, there were only minimal gains in reading fluency..."
- "However, the most surprising result...was that the acceleration of reading (i.e. the same task performed at the fast rate) resulted in a relative normalization of the brain area engagement patterns in the dyslexic readers..."

Other comments to add - the study reinforces the foolishness of phonics-only approaches to dyslexia, and it underscores the importance of reading fluency as a dyslexia-associated condition.

The speed reading-dyslexic creates a lot of confusion in the school system (for example, how can letter reversals and spelling errors be dyslexia if the reading comprehension is so good?) and problems with kids failing to receive appropriate accommodations. In order to efficiently speed read, students need to have learned a sufficient body of words recognized by sight. Also, some dyslexic lawyers have shared with us that if they have to read every word of some printed material, they will speed read the document several times to make sure they have not missed anything.

Faster is Better - University Student Dyslexics

The Math Circle

Check out this offering for young gifted math enthusiasts: for 9-11 year olds there's knots, game theory, concurrency and collinearity, Pythagorean triples, mathematical origami, Steiner points... The history reads: "Disturbed by the poor quality and low level of math education in the country, the three of us...

The Math Circle

Tape Loop or Visual Sketch Pad? It'll Affect Your Multi-Tasking

Some of you will remember this from The Pleasure of Finding Things out - Richard Feynman found he couldn't count and talk at the same time, while a colleague couldn't count and read at the same time. Why was this? The answer is a surprisingly helpful tidbit for understanding your as well as others' different ways of taking information 'in'.

"Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads when they think they're doing the same thing--something as simple as counting--is different for different people...(when) Tukey was counting...he was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by...(whereas)I'm "talking" to myself when I'm counting, so I can't speak!"

What Feynman discovered was the Tape Loop and Visual Spatial Sketchpad - the most different routes for storing information. Most people prefer one route much more over the other and some may only effectively have one, but know what you have available can be a powerful tool.

One the most important reasons is that working memory can often get jammed when too much information is coming in at once. If you can flexibly switch modes (depending on the multi-tasking needs at the time), then you take information in more efficiently and multi-task. Always the tweaker, Feynman also began to play with sensory-motor or kinesthetic memory and spatial imagery:"After that discovery, I tried to figure out oa way of reading out loud while counting-something niether of us could do. I figured I'd have to use a part of my brain that wouldn't interfere with the seeing or speaking departments, so I decided to use my fingers, since that involved the sense of touch. I soon succeeded in counting with my fingers and reading out loud. But Iwanted the whole process to be mental, and not rely on any physical activity. So I tried to imagine the feeling of my fingers moving while I was reading out loud. I never succeeded. I figured that was because I hand't practiced enough, but it might be impossible..."

Check out this nice article (with excerpts) about the newly released letters of Feynman from his daughter (here). We were especially moved by his letters of encouragement to others and the letter that concludes the article.

Learning to Think Like a Child

Here's some research showing where kids better than adults: children are better recognizers of the visual differences (the study used pictures of different animals). It may be that everything is more novel to them and they more interested, but reflects Ohio State University researcher Vladmir Sloutsky, "As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences." Interestingly, adults regained that child-like memory for differences if they were shown novel and completely imaginary figures.

This like those "child-like" creative geniuses you read about biographical accounts. These men and women have a "child-like" way of seeing familiar things as if for the first time.

Science Daily article
Sloutsky paper 2005

MIT World: Videos on Innovation

Another amazing resource for University-based lectures. This one is MIT World and the link below takes you to a lecture on Educational Innovation. Included in this talk is Henry Jenkins arguing for more and better video games in education. 1/3 of MIT entering freshman admitted to playing video games during class. The answer, says Jenkins, is getting the teacher to play more games during class.

MIT World: Focus on Educational Innovation

National Report on Early School Experiences (NCES)

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has now released its report on Early School Experiences.

Take-home points:

- 'Interest' in reading correlates with achievement (So if you can't read well, you probably won't like it)
- Full vs. half day kindergarten doesn't affect achievement
- By the end of the 3rd grade, kids can identify words, but struggle with inferences
- Only 29% of 3rd graders can make inferences beyond the literal text (27% public, 37% private)
- By the end of the 3rd grade, boys are better at word problems, but girls are at reading
- Private school students outscored public in reading, math, and science
- African American students showed the slowest rise in achievement from kindergarten to the 3rd grade
- "Full-day kindergarten is not randomly distributed; rather, children at risk of school failure are more likely to attend such programs (Walston and West 2004)"
- Highest scoring kids in reading have parents with highest level of education and the most books at home (> 100)

Executive Summary, From Kindergarten Through Third Grade
The Condition of Education 2004

SAT Writing Scores - Not Ready for Prime Time

Check out the New York Times article below:

Fewer than half of the country's colleges and universities are requiring applicants to submit SAT writing scores, and says the College Board spokeswoman Chiara Coletti, "We have never recommended that schools use it in admissions decisions right away. Since this is a new test, it makes sense to be careful in how it's used the first year." Said Steven Syverson, Dean of Admissions at Lawrence University, "When we heard the test-prep industry say it would add $200 million a year to coaching revenues, we just said, 'That's it. It's out of line, it's out of whack, and we don't want to be part of it.' "

SAT Essay NY Times

The Research Channel - Extensive Video Library

Check out the free streaming video resources at the Research Channel (University Consortium). Here's a link to Johns Hopkins Spaghetti Bridge Building (engineering), but there the library is extensive: other titles include autonomous robots, digital media design, and oh - plenty of brain stuff.

ResearchChannel: Spaghetti Bridge Building

What Today's Students Can Learn from IDEO

What is IDEO? IDEO is a world reknown and innovative design firm that helped develop Apple Computer's first mouse, the Palm V, the insulin pen, the first stand-up toothpaste tube, and overhauled the consumer experiences of Kaiser Permanente Hospitals and high fashion dressing rooms.

So why would this mean anything to students? With the Information Revolution, facts and information base are not the essential commodity any more. It's no longer vital to "know that", but rather to "know why" and "how to make better." And these skills are right up IDEO's alley. What IDEO may help specifically with is a more systematic approach to teaching and encouraging problem solving.

While reading Kelly's The Art of Innovation, we found the following ideas for the classroom:

- Innovation Begins with the Eye: Ala Training Tweakers, IDEO is also a big fan of the Critical Eye. IDEO encourages creative critique by direct experience, interviewing, reflection on opinions and gut feelings, and finding problems that others hadn't seen before.

- Model Fluency with Ideas: IDEO has a number of tips about how to conduct good brainstorming sessions, including ideas for modeling fluency. First, IDEO likes to number their ideas to encourage generating lots of ideas, even off-the-wall or half-baked ones. Second, provide concrete examples of solutions that other people have devised ("One of the best brainstormers I ever attended at IDEO was an exploration of alternative wine beverage containers. Before the brain-stormer, we covered a conference table with bottles, closures, materials, and mechanisms ranging from the retro porcelain Grolsch beer bottle stopper to an elegant black Japanese sake flask..."). This sounds a little like Einstein working in the Patent Office. Brainstorming sessions don't just 'happen', they also have been well researched. Having examples readily in hand can be stimulating for more ideas.

- Cultivate Hot Groups: Carefully select groups and recognize diversity and contributions of different personalities. Students would benefit from learning about different creative personalities and different successful roles in innovative groups. Why should instruction in group interactions wait until they have entered the workforce?

- Make Prototypes: Draw and physically make something from your ideas, then test it out in the field. Get physical, "sketching, mind mapping, diagrams, and stick figures..." and make a model with available parts (the first mouse was prototyped using the cover of a butter dish).

- Cross-Pollinate and Jump Barriers: Teach students that the best ideas may be found from beyond the group or from a different field. Suggest analogies from different disciplines. Change experience and points-of-view. Cursory exposures to problem solving in the classroom may defeat the purpose of the lesson. Don't allow cheats or predictable answers. Encourage far out ideas and interdisciplinary thinking.

ThePower Of Design
ideo.com

Dutch Science Free & Activating Your Brain

Bravo to the Dutch scientific community. Against the objections of Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, academics in the Netherlands have banded together to publish all scientific work to the worldwide community on the Internet. All Dutch research is now available at: DAREnet. A similar movement was afoot in the U.S. (all taxpayers fund the research, why shouldn't the results be accessible to them?), but the NIH blinked and as a result, not most NIH-funded reports are not freely available to the public.

One of the Dutch reports (here) now freely available shows an fMRI of a 28 year-old controlling his cingulate cortex activation through brain-computer interface or bci. The cingulate, as you may remember, is an interesting area for its implication in ADHD, reward, motivation, and decision-making.

Very cool. What did this fellow use to 'activate' his brain? Apparently he found that thinking of winter landscapes, snowboarding, and social interactions turned his anterior cingulate 'on'.



For more on the ADHD and Reward pictures, check out Money, Motivation, ADHD, and the Brain.

Importance of Visual Spatial Imagery in Algebraic Word Problem Solving

In this study, entitled "An fMRI study of the interplay of symbolic and visuo-spatial systems in mathematical reasoning", researchers found that successful solution of algebraic word problems required activation of parietal areas classically associated with visual spatial imagery. These areas were also activated when subjects were told to mentally construct a number line.



The important finding is that the imagery areas were important regardless of whether students solved problems using a picture strategy or a representation (make another equation) strategy. "This means that constructing an equation, which apparently is a symbolic task, recruits the visuo-spatial system."

Language areas were activated under both conditions, but not more active under symbolic vs. picture conditions. Other interesting points raised in the paper were observations that instruction in pictorial representations helped solve word problems more easily, and that poor performances correlated with 'direct translation' strategies rather than visual imagery.

There are other studies to support the importance of parietal imagery areas in verbal, tactile, and visual problems solving ( for instance, here and here), but visual or spatial strategies for teaching are often less common in the K-12 classroom perhaps because of the verbal learning style of many teachers. Hmmm. Think, think, think.

Visual Spatial Imagery and Algebraic Word Problems

Cultivating Kid Critics: Different Versions and Star Wars Revelations

An easy way to cultivate kid critiques - is to have them watch or read / watch different versions of the same story. For the toddler set this could be cartoon versions of familiar tales (cartoons are ripe for this - Christmas Carol, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.), or for the older set, various remakes. Talk about what worked and what didn't. Compare and contrast.

And now for the Star Wars set, there's an ambitious Star Wars Fan movie (written, acted, produced by fans) that's available for download at the link below (HT: collision detection). Because it's a big file, you'll have to either use Bit torrent file sharing, or be patient with the conventional download as a quicktime movie. It's amazing. They even made some "Behind the Scenes" clips. Bravo! Maybe even movies can become an "interactive medium" like the blogosphere.

Star Wars Revelations

Why Branding Matters - Influencing Perception

It makes a difference how you deliver the news. This is an important point regardless of whether you're a parent, teacher, CEO, or advertising guru. These studies show that perception is affected by prior knowledge - whether it's branding in the case of Coke vs. Pepsi, or a placebo effect from people being told they were trying out a new pain-relieving cream.

The first study:"...brand knowledge (at least in the case of Coke in our study) biases preference decisions and recruits the hippocampus, DLPFC, and midbrain...". So taste alone does not affect the choice of Coke over Pepsi - a preconceived preference "had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses."



Or check out this second study - all the areas of red showed correlated with greater pain than in placebo trials.


So what should be the take home point for education or parenting? Think about how you present information to your kids. Take the time to increase their interest, reduce their fear, or build their curiosity. It's not hype or frill. How you present information influences the quality of information that gets in, and the richness of its memory.

Coke vs Pepsi and fMRI
Placebo Reduces Perception of Pain

Interview with Bram Cohen of Bit Torrent, Re: Asperger's

We came across this nice interview with Bram Cohen (BitTorrent ) about his experience with Aspergers.

Excerpt:
"I hated school, and dropped out of college. I got picked on a lot in school, and had a lot of trouble making friends... One thing about school - I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn't care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren't very good..."

Interview with Bram Cohen

(HT:Blogdex)

Game Fluency at Carnegie Mellon

"The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away." - Linus Pauling

Check out this principle in action at the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon: the goal is to make a game in less than 7 days by yourself.

Experimental Gameplay Project, Carnegie Mellon University

When Five Senses Become One - Sensory Integration and Virtual Rehabilitation

Gemma Calvert's review begins, "The past decade has witnessed a growing shift of emphasis away from the study of the senses in isolation and towards an understanding of how the human brain coordinates the unique sensory impression provided by the different sensory streams..." New technology has provided researchers with a glimpse of complexity of how primary senses interact, integrate, and are coordinated with each other. It looks like there are sites that integrate signals from different sensory modalities (like sight and sound) early in the processing pathway, in addition to late actors that coordinate the different received signals to convey a 'gestalt' view of the outside world.

The research itself is fascinating, but be aware that it will take years for the information to trickle down to many medical professionals, educational experts, and the public at large. With many sites for the integration of sensory signals to be affected, the clinical presentations are diverse. Look at the figure below.



There are some areas that are relatively selective for visual, auditory, or tactile motion processing, but other areas that seem to process various combinations of inputs. Knock any one out, and the others are affected. The computing brain will now receive inaccurate signals about motion, the result being mistakes in the gauging of self-movement (may act clumsy), the movement of others, and errors of sight (moving people, read text on a page) or sound etc. localization.

The downside of multisensory integration is that if one sensory modality is defective, there's a high likelihood that other senses can be affected too. In some cases this is good - like hearing becoming more sensitive in the setting of visual deprivation - but in others, the compensations may cause problems of their own (e.g. auditory hypersensitivity, hyperactivity from tactile, proprioceptive, or movement-seeking behaviors).

Interestingly, some of the new research technologies might also prove extremely valuable to future rehabilitation techniques. Researchers have already been able to demonstrate that functional imaging can visualize changes in brain activation when subjects voluntarily direct their attention toward or away from sensory stimuli (thereby affecting sensitivity and reaction times) but rehabilitation researchers want to carry the work a step further, for instance learning the best 'tweaks' optimize multisensory integration as well as motor recovery.

Multisensory Research (technical)
Multisensory Perception of Movement pdf
Multisensory Integration During Motor Planning pdf
Believable VIrtual Environment

Cultivating Kid Critics: Was the Moon Landing a Hoax?

From the homeschooling family that wrote The Fallacy Detective, here is a short article about the possibility fallacy and the Moon Hoax. Even young children are amused by hoaxes and 'tricks', and by incorporating these lessons in their education, you can encourage them to think more carefully and critically.

Possibly vs. Probably - Was the Moon Landing a Hoax?
Response to Moon Hoax
NASA's Answer to the Moon Hoax

How to Reduce the Math Gender Gap

The gender gap in math is widening, with young women lagging men in numbers and performance beginning in the middle school years, through college, into graduate education, and on to tenured faculty. What are possible causes of this discrepancy and is there anything we can do about it?

First the data: In early elementary school, girls and boys achieve at similar levels. By middle school and high school, however, the gap appears. Boys consistently outperform girls on the Math section of the SAT, the AP Calculus, Computer Science, and Physics exams, and at the college level, in one federal study, 44% of male science majors chose engineering, compared to 12% of females. The trend holds among advanced degrees and tenured faculty.

What are possible factors at work?

1. Social and Environmental Factors

Do you remember when "Teen Talk Barbie" briefly said "Math Class is tough!" before she was removed from the shelves? Not surprisingly, there are both home and school (peer, teacher) social factors that can discourage girls from higher level mathematics. In this study from Penn State, a father's "gender stereotype" regarding math ability appeared to correlate well with a child's interest:


The amount of time mothers spent doing math activities with their children, didn't seem to account for the difference (mothers spent more time with their daughters doing math activities in the early grades), although by late elementary school, both parents were more likely to be purchasing math and science items for their sons rather than their daughters.

2. Biological Factors

Biological factors got Harvard University president Larry Summers into hot water, but perhaps that was more for his extrapolation and clumsiness than anything else. The truth is, we are all biologically different, and understanding how differently we perceive and learn material provides valuable information about how to design individualized learning approaches.

There are some gender-related differences in the way information is processed, and these results should be properly understood as averaged results from small groups. fMRI studies should never be mistaken for large scale population studies or genetic imperatives. Check out the fMRI results below for men and women navigating their way out of a virtual maze.



The different areas of brain that light up suggest that an averaged group of men and women tended to undertake different strategies to navigate their way out of a virtual maze.

What about that other study, you ask? - the one that, using a slightly different task, found that women and men both used the hippocampus to recall position? Well, on close reading of the methods of that study (sorry, only abstract online), this study was different because the researchers were more directive in telling their subjects how to learn the routes (e.g. "notice where the vehicles come from") and a second task directly tested recall of an aerial map.

So it may be that in general, when asked to navigate their way out of a virtual maze, women are more likely to use landmarks ("I'll make two left turns after the white house") than picture an aerial map, but when more directly instructed, they can use the aerial strategy just like most male subjects. The distinction is an important one - because the aerial map would appear to be a better approach. If you miss one of the landmarks or turns, you may still find your destination by geometry.

3. Practice, Practice, Practice

Finally, there are various lines of data that suggest that by the time young men have chosen their careers, they have had more spatial practice than women. Boys are more likely to play video games, tinker with building projects, and have models or mechanical gadgets as hobbies (the latter could also account for the buying preference of parents). These types of practice could account for the lead men have in studies of imagined rotation of objects (verified in many different research paradigms). Interestingly, the gap between mental rotation performance in men and women can be narrowed if women are provided with more spatial practice (computer simulation or sketching). This suggests that more training and 'playing' with hand and eye activities may narrow the gender gap in mathematics and math-related disciplines.

The Gender Gap in Math and Science
Educators Revisit Girls Loss of Math, Science Interest
Boston.com Women and science: the real issue
Penn State Gender Issues and Math
Gender and Spatial Navigation
Scaffolding Female Engineering Students in Spatial Reasoning
Sketching improves Spatial Visualization for Men and Women

Improving Science Reading Comprehension

Here are good practical recommendations for helping to improve Science Reading Comprehension. In this NSTA article, the authors recommend Pre-Reading, Key Words, and Active Reading strategies like anticipatory questions and responding personally to the information. Students also often benefit from learning how to focus on important information - captions, figures, and summary questions. Paraphrasing the reading afterward also serves to consolidate the information so it can be stored in long term memory.

Improving Science Reading Comprehension

19th Century Mind Your Manners

Here's a cute little online game using 'role play' to give kids a sense of the change in social customs since Victorian times. Hat tip: MetaFilter.com

Mind Your Manners Game

Greene & Greene, Hands-On Learning, and Patterns from Nature

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius

We just got back from a weekend in Quinault's Rain Forest, and patterns from nature and the education of Charles and Henry Greene were on our mind. The picture below is from the Greene and Greene's Gamble house and a pattern we found on a fallen tree.



Not surprisingly, nature one of the most common sources for creative ideas in art, invention, science, or writing. Some ideas are found by closer or unconventional inspection; while analogy is useful in other situations.

The Greene brothers were remarkable architects who helped give create the American Arts & Crafts movement in the early part of the 19th Century. Interestingly, the Greenes attended an innovative school that was built on the premise that "the well-educated man should work with his hands as well as his mind." At the Manual Training High School, operated by Washington University St. Louis, the hands-on learning was not seen to be vocational, but rather a way to instill the practical applications of principles and formulae that students were learning.

Hands-on learning is a way to test out or verify ideas, make predictions, play around with ideas (prototyping), and develop visual and spatial imagery. It's interesting that another hands-on educational theorist, Frederich Froebel, had Frank Lloyd Wright as a student. Wright would later recall Froebel blocks fondly as,"the smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterwards leaves the fingers: so form became feeling."

Interior photographs of The Gamble House
Greene & Greene Virtual Archives: About The Greenes

Sensory-Motor Dysgraphia Mis-Diagnosed as Underachievement

In our practice, unrecognized dysgraphia is a common cause of 'underachievement' and 'oppositionally-defiant disorder' in school age children, particularly boys. For some reason, dysgraphia has not garnered the attention of 'attention deficit disorder' or or other learning disabilities, and therefore children who are struggling with undiagnosed disabilities are mistaken for being lazy or defiant.

A child who is lame, rarely will be scolded or told to run extra laps at home, but a child with fine motor or other causes of dysgraphia is may be publicly disgraced about 'sloppy work', told to finish work at home (though it could take hours or be practically impossible), or denied recess on a regular basis to 'finish work.'

There are several types of dysgraphia, but in this post, we will discuss motor dysgraphia, or difficulty writing due to impaired fine motor or sensory-motor coordination.

In the figure below, are a variety of dysfunctional hand grips that occur in a variety of clinical settings - but most often mild birth injury or prematurity. Though motor / sensory-motor dysgraphia is remarkably common in today's classroom (perhaps because of rising prematurity or greater survival of high risk pregnancies), teachers receive little instruction in its occurrence, and accommodations are woefully underutilized. Dysfunctional grips often have the pencil tipped forward or out of the webspace. The first three fingers are not brought together in a pinch, but rather fisted or awkwardly positioned with the sides of fingers. When children are forced to writing with very dysfunctional grasps, then pain or even repetitive stress injuries can result. Often children develop behavioral problems like task or school avoidance. Occupational therapy may help many children, but sometimes time and accommodation are needed to allow handwriting to develop to a functional level.



The first link below is to a paper describes how brain-based injury to sensory-motor systems causes individuals to press harder than normal to compensate for their loss of control. The paper concludes, "When sensory information is degraded, an increase of grip force is interpreted as a compensatory strategic increase of the safety margin to protect against unexpected load perturbations that cannot be rapidly and accurately sense ands responded by a reactive grip force increase."

Children with mild neurological injury may use a very tight grasp on the pen or pencil that results in heavy pencil pressure, poor writing endurance, and hand cramping. Some teachers or administrators fear that providing a student with appropriate dysgraphia-related accommodations will result in a child "never learning to write"; however, this is not true. In fact, by denying children appropriate accommodations, these students may never be given adequate practice with higher order writing tasks like paragraph organization or redrafting, because they can't get much down on the page by hand.

Tighter Grip to Compensate for Lack of Control
Pencil Grasps

Flashes from the Past: One Remarkable Mother

He said that his mother was "an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants, and separated the fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home was the product of her hands."

As a young man, this genius from the past had many bad habits and got into difficulties. He was expelled from college and then from the city because of "playing cards and leading an irregular life." When his mother scraped together enough money to attend University in another city (his father was not talking to him), he wasted the chance again. Then, he recalls, one day "when I had lost all my money and was craving for a game, she came to me with a roll of bills and said, 'Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know you will get over it.' She was right. I conquered my passion then and there..."

His mother's belief in him at that moment convinced Nikola Tesla to give up his life as a wastrel. He gave up gambling and he gave up drinking. Tesla went on to educate himself by auditing courses and reading in the library at the University. He would go onto register over 700 patents and discover fluorescent light, the laser beam, wireless communications, remote control, robotics, Tesla's turbines, and vertical take off aircraft. His alternating current induction motor is considered one of the ten greatest discoveries of all time. His mother was also quite some lady.

Have a Happy Mother's Day.

Tesla Website

If you want to read a book biography about Tesla, check here.

Speech and Language Games

Check out this nice site for free online practice with many aspects of language - including word retrieval, idioms, homonyms / antonyms, semantics, and syntax. Tracy Boyd is a speech language pathologist.

Quia Boyd Speech Therapy Games

Visual Spatial Decision-Making

Good decisions are the foundations for problem solving, and this additional study adds more details about the steps for solving multi-stepped visual spatial puzzles. Here the researchers found that efficient problem solvers of the Tower of London task were able to activate a larger area of their right prefrontal cortex, an important area for pattern recognition and pattern sorting . Other brain areas that were necessary, included regions associated with visual spatial attention, motor and visual spatial imagery, and spatial working memory.

For those who like keeping up with the cingulate cortex (area associated with selective attention, ADHD, reward / punishment), there were additional details about how the cingulate appeared to be activated not just when an error was detected, but when it appeared that brain needed to generate other alternatives (replan) in presence of incorrect solutions.

Some links below to extend thinking about how to foster or cultivate efficient decision making. Decision-making should be fostered from an early age, but often the ends (results, facts mastered) are emphasized over process. The pattern of efficient visual spatial decision-making suggested that the best problem solvers were superior at other subtasks such as pattern recognition and pattern sorting.

When Planning Fails Abstract
Overview of Decision Making
Basic Guidelines to Problem Solving and Decision Making
Decision Making Techniques- Mind Tools
Tower of London 2003

MIT Professor Blasts SAT Writing Test

The link will take you to the NYTimes, but reading the whole article requires free registration. An MIT Professor who sat on a panel for the new SAT writing test says: "It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score," Dr. Perelman said. A man on the panel from the College Board disagreed. "He told me I was jumping to conclusions". But Dr. Perlman apparently went on to complain about the fact that students are not downgraded for factual errors. "An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the "firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862." (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James M. McPherson, it was "33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells." Hmmm.
New York SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors

World Building with Dr. Viau

We accidentally came across this website while surfing topics related to tropical rainforests (we're visiting our own Washington temperate rain forest soon). The Elizabeth Viau site is a wonderful imaginative scientific romp into designer 'worlds'. The computer technology is fairly low tech, but the science is intriguing. Great ideas here for problem-based learning in astronomy, geology, biology, and environmental science in general. Students gain practice at identifying questions and making predictions.

World Builders Lessons

How Should We Be Teaching Reading? Humans or Software?

The latest of issue of Harvard's Education Letter, Elizabeth Kidder takes on the Brain-Based Reading Software Fast Forword with her discussion of a recent Princeton study. What are the results? Rouse and Krueger found only that slight benefits for children in their large randomized study. Rouse and Krueger studied children in urban schools with lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They were 3rd-6th graders, 40% African Americans and 50% Hispanic and scored in the lowest 20% on a standardized reading test.

The Results reported in the Economics of Educational Review (sorry not available free online): 50-60% of students were unable to keep up with the demands of computer training (about 90 minutes a day). Of the ones remaining, slight improvement was see on the Reading Edge test, but no improvement on the CELF-3. They conclude that the slight benefit was seen because: "computers are not an effective substitute for traditional classroom instruction, or because educators have not learned how to effectively use computer technology to enhance instruction, or because there are other aspects to the school setting that make it difficult to incorporate computerized instruction into the curriculum." They further challenge: "Ask hard questions about whether to invest in educational software, brain-based or otherwise. Ask not just whether or not it works in general, in theory, but whether it is actually going to work with all the warts, etc., on a school day...and show me the empirical evidence. From the fMRI on down, does it ultimately mean kids will be able to read better?"

Oh dear, oh dear. The Princeton is not well-conceived because it never selected children with known phonological problems. There are a wide range of difficulties that can contribute to problems with reading, including impaired visual processing, impaired attention or memory, and social or behavioral problems. We never recommend auditory processing software if auditory processing problems aren't present. No data was given regarding IQ (retardation?), attention deficit, or any other confounding factors. The researchers just took all the students who performed in the lowest 20% on a standardized reading test. Aren't schools identifying which students need which particular kinds of help?

Any good reading teacher knows struggling readers may have very different problems. Schools need to abandon the idea of "one-size-fits-all" curricula and focus instead on how to better match specific needs to specific solutions. If a child with phonological problems can pick up word sounds by careful one-on-one reading with a parent or tutor, then the software isn't needed. But if one-on-one or conventional teaching isn't working and problem is clearly sound discrimination, then targeted incrementally-challenging software may really be helpful.

Also with this Princeton study, there was apparently not much warm-up time for adopting the computer technology. The study suggested computer glitches happened often, and it even mentions that Scientific Learning had suboptimal technical assistance- but the company was also not given the opportunity to rebut the remarks anywhere we could see.

It's not hard to detect a feeling of animosity in the Princeton report - and we aren't sure why. Maybe it's because Scientific Learning has decided to price their software so high ($1000-1500; they should drop their prices). Maybe because the 90 minute requirement seems too inflexible. Still another reason may be that educators feel that neuroscientists are muscling in on their area of expertise. But educators and neuroscientists have a lot to learn from each other - so we hope more cooperative opportunities present themselves, rather than groups taking sides.

Both one-on-one / small group instruction and software-based training can help struggling readers get up to speed. What's really needed are more studies to figure out how children are best matched to particular learning approaches.

The figure below shows some of brain pics in dyslexia. Some have auditory processing problems, others have visual processing problems, and still others have both. As fancy as the brain pictures look, the science is clearly in its earliest stages. Researchers are just beginning to investigate other associations of dyslexia - including impaired fluency (speed), naming, and comprehension. From the functional imaging perspective, we also do not know much about how the patterns change over time or how different strategies may compensate for particular learning blocks. And to our knowledge, no studies have yet looked at the spectrum of differences among individual dyslexics.



How Good Is Fast Forword?
Stanford Fast Forword fMRI pdf
Visual Processing dyslexia fMRI

Creativity Pearls from Lemelson

Take-Home Points from Lemelson Inventors:

* Keep Making It Better (Tweaking)
* Recognize the Unusual
* Jump the Tracks
* Borrow from Nature
* Find Opportunities in Obstacles
* Many Heads are Better Than One

Check out their stories here.

Finding and Retrieving Patterns

"Don't underestimate this idea of mine...to pause sometimes to look into these stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places. If these are well contemplated, you will find fantastic inventions that awaken the genius of the painter to new inventions, such as compositions of battles, animals, and men, as well as diverse composition of landscapes, and monstrous things, as devils and the like. This will do you well because they will awaken genius with this jumble of things..." - Leonardo Da Vinci

Finding patterns is how we learn, how we make sense of the inflooding of sensory information, and how solve new problems. Pattern recognition can be conscious or subconscious, and finding the best pattern to match a particular problem is as important as synthesizing a patter in the first place.

Here's some interesting work that found that the right prefrontal cortex can't help noticing visual patterns: "We informed subjects that the stimuli were presented in a random sequence, that there was no need to make explicit predictions and that there was no benefit in doing so...they still noticed patterns in the sequence." The right hemisphere is the dreamy, intuitive, and less verbal side of the brain.



So maybe that's how it is. There are parts of our brains that are always noticing and remembering patterns, but then they get filed away. Perhaps Da Vinci's trick was just a clever way of bringing them to consciousness and finding novel matches. Maurits Escher had a similar practice. He doodled faces and intersecting animals in the wood grain of his bathroom wall.

Finding Patterns
Patterns Press Release

Online Schools in the News

Several recent newspaper articles about online education. Online learning appears to be succeeding for various groups: including gifted students who need more acceleration and failing students who don't have to wait until summer to retake a course. Online tutoring has also caught on, and it's especially convenient for children who qualify for extra help because of NCLB. Brainfuse is one of the larger online tutoring businesses - and they find that 74% of families have reported higher grades as a result.

Online Schools for Remediation
Online Schools for Gifted
Brainfuse

Training Tweakers

With the dismal showing of United States high school students in the international problem solving assessment (PISA), there's a lot of talk these days about redirecting the focus of education on problem solving. The effects of the World Wide Web and Internet have also made knowledge alone less important, but application, implication, and analysis more important.

It's not a trivial matter teaching students problem solving. In fact, people who are adept at problem solving seem to have been doing it ever since they were kids. See what Tom Kelley says about his brother IDEO founder David Kelley: "My brother David, for example, has been building things and then trying to make them better for as long as I can remember. We had a snowy Ohio winter the year I was six years old, and David started a series of increasingly complex snow construction projects in the backyard. He started with the basics--three tiered snowmen--but soon progressed to whole forts by lining up snowmen shoulder-to-shoulder to form four walls. Looking for the next revision of his prototype fort, David briefly considered a two-story model, which he thankfully abandoned when he hit upon the idea of using a cardboard box to make snow "bricks"...(then) David hit upon an idea for revision 2.1: adding water to each brick so that it would freeze to a solid and incredibly heavy) block of ice..."

So before educational experts dive into the problem of how to teach problem solving, we might ask, what can be do to cultivate the temperaments of Tweakers. Tweakers are people who have creative discontent. They are not just critics, but intrinsically motivated people who seem to be striving toward perfection. Tweakers are generally confident that the way things are can generally be made better, and that they can find some way to do it.

There are some children who step out of the cradle as natural-born Tweakers, but others have bits and pieces of the successful profile, and its clear that more need to be encouraged to follow in that way. What the successful environments for cultivating Tweakers? Here are a few we came up with:

· Critical eye - Tweakers first have to see that something is wrong or could be improved; they have to be opinionated and critical of themselves as well as others
· Time to Tweak - tweaking takes time - there has to be some trial and error, rumination, discussion with others, and exposure to different ideas or perspectives
· Power to Tweak - having the power in situations to see the outcome of changes or tweaks
· Persevering with a Problem - the puzzle aspect to problem solving is fun for the Tweaker, but sometimes children need to appreciate the fact that the best puzzles are those that are not solved easily or in the same day
· Where or How to Find Ideas - there are better and worse ways to come up with good ideas - bad: looking up cheats or answers, good: reasoning or hypothesizing from analogy or metaphor, changing perspective, finding new information, trying new strategy

What are environments that could stifle tweaking?

· Stifle Criticism- family or classroom environments that discourage free expression, opinion-making or criticism promote passivity and acceptance of the ways things are
· No Time to Tweak- moved quickly from task-to-task, once skill mastered, moved onto another. Artificial environment or curricula where problems and answers are selected for simple or predictable outcomes. Excessive or frequent testing.
· No Power to Tweak - no personal responsibility to a task, no possibility or too risky to try out outlandish ideas, no opportunity to work with primary materials and observe result
· Quick Answers - expectations for results within short time periods. No ambiguity or incompletely answered questions
· No Modeling of Idea Fluency or Problem Solving - many people, not just kids, have unrealistic ideas of how problems should be solved

If we tally up the characteristics of ideal environments for Tweakers, it's easy to see where existing educational approaches fall short. But somehow we must find a way to fill students up with both information and a Tweaker's approach to life. In future posts we'll think about the specific issues of training of Tweakers in science and technology, language arts, mathematics, and social studies.

Horizontal and Vertical Thinking at ZenPundit

Check out an interesting discussion of Horizontal and Vertical Thinking at ZenPundit. There mark asks the interesting question, can we do anything to improve our frequency of learning by 'insight'?

Among the highest level creative thinkers, both horizontal and vertical types of thinking appear to be working together to get the job done. Pure vertical thinking may fail by not casting the net wide enough, while pure horizontal thinking may fail by not selecting the best match.

Intuitive thinking is somewhat mysterious because most of it seems to be below the level of conscious thought, but we think it can be fostered and cultivated, though with different approaches than conscious deductive or analytical thought.

Interestingly, mark's post mentions Edward De Bono. At least in our elementary understanding of De Bono's work, we did not view his Lateral (or Horizontal? ) approach to thinking as being Intuitive - rather it seemed to be a rigorous Conscious or Cognitive approach to generating Horizontal data.

That's not exactly what biographies suggest the Intuitive process is like for some thinkers - nor in our intuitive experiences as well. What we'd like to think about more in future posts is how Intuitive or Insight-Based approaches to problem solving can be enriched or improved. There's quite a lot of autobiographical and biographical material on this subject.

Is Novelty-Seeking a Bad Thing?

"The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting" - Richard Feynman


When we hear parents or teachers lament about 'novelty-seeking' it seems like definitely unwanted trait. What are the bad things we think about novelty-seeking? High risk behaviors? Undesireable Experimentation? The dark side of ADHD?

But this is not a balance view of novelty. Novelty-seeking is wired into certain ways that we learn. And for some people, it may be their preferred way of learning. In the linked papers below, the anatomy of 'novelty seeking' does not suggest that novelty seeking results from the loss of restraint or deficiency in some brain function. Rather, there are special areas of brain that preferentially respond to novelty, and these areas interestingly are centers for personal or autobiographical memory and multisensory (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) experience.



So a novel experience that can help us in problem solving, is one that is very different from our experience. It something that can help use reexamine our assumptions, reframe our questions, or completely change our point-of-view. In this way, the novelty learning preference is more alligned to inductive learning (generating the principle from the novel example) and hands-on learning.

Needless to say, this is not the dominant style of teaching in the K-12 classroom. For children who seem to strongly prefer novelty-learning, though, it might well be worthwhile considering whether a different educational format is really what is needed to teach them in the way they want to learn.

Multisensory Novelty Regions
Novelty Seeking and Medial Temporal Lobe
IngentaConnect Novelty Seeking and Reward: Impli...the Study of High-Risk Behaviors

Virtual vs. Real People? The Brain Can Tell

Real movies of humans vs. virtual movies of humans activate different brain pathways - at least in this study. Here researchers found that the 'anime humans' activated imagery areas, so they were recognized to some extent as 'unreal'. Wonder if that would hold true for CGI?


Virtual vs Real

Understanding the Connectivity Theory and Autism

There are many lines of evidence that many of the cognitive and behavioral difficulties associated with autism are due changes in the connectivity of brain areas. As a result, children or adults with autism have problems with activities that require the coordination of multiple brain areas (imagery) or flexible understanding (multiple representations) or spoken language.

In this paper from Stanford, the discussion is on "underconnectivity", but "overconnectivity" occurs in other systems resulting in overlod or hypersensitivities. From the paper:"The underconnectivity framework can account for the social symptoms of autism. Social interactions place large (if not the largest) demands on information integration. This model attributes social abnormalities in autism to a deficit in integrative processing. Abnormalities may arise in integrating the perceptual and affective processing of social stimuli such as face affect and prosody with language iwht the concurrent theory of mind processing to determine the social partner's intentions."

In the figures below, see the difference in the extent of brain activation with sentence comprehension. Also, when many brain areas are compared, high function autistic subjects had much lower levels of connectivity, at least as measured by activation on fMRI.



An interesting side note was that autistic subjects appeared able to answer sentence comprehension questions more rapidly, though less accurately especially when sentence structure was more demanding. More errors were noted with passive voice sentences like: "The editor was saved by the secretary" than "The cook thanked the father."


Underconnectivity and Autism (pdf file)

When Quiet Kids Get Forgotten in Class

Came across this article by accident, and it gave us the excuse to share some other introverted / shy child links.

When quiet kids get forgotten in class
Introversion
Introverted Children in Extroverted Schools
GDC On Introversion
Activities Where Your Introverted Child Can Win
Introverted Child
The Shy Child
Working with Shy or Withdrawn Students
Social Skills and School

Increase the Challenge, Increase the Attention

Here's a nice research review of selective attention in Trends in Cognitive Neuroscience. Here's one interesting finding:



Older adults and younger school age children had problems with focus at low levels of 'visual challenge' (the task was to hunt for a letter in the setting of side distracting letter). When the task was made more challenging (centrally distracting letters), both the older and younger subjects performed better!

Think about this. This means that a significant component of visual distractibility is under cognitive control. For the school age child or older adult, hard is easy, and easy is hard. Maybe this should not be as counterintuitive as thought though. When are you most likely to doze off or daydream in a lecture - when you know most of the material and it all looks too elementary? or when you're presented with an intellectual challenge?

It also suggests that it might be wise to not be dismissive of age-related attention-focusing problems. There may be a lot to work with...

Perceptual Load and Attention

Flashes from the Past: "He had as many as three or four epileptic spells a day..."

He had as many as three or four epileptic spells a day, and also had frequent attacks of asthma. Tutored at home by his older sister, he didn't attend school until he was 11 years old. He loved writing poetry at an early age and also found he had a talent for drawing. In a letter to his sister at age 14, he was already making up words. The letter started "Dear, and very dear relation, Time who flies without cessation"...The letter goes on to include words like "deliquation", "obtrectation", and "refulerlation".

Who was this? This was the remarkable Edward Lear - author of Nonsense Poems and Sketches, and an impressive landscape artist in his own right until he gave it up because of partial blindness. Edward Lear had a truly remarkable life, and if your children love his limericks, check out the kids' biography: "Edward Lear, King of Nonsense", written by Gloria Kamen (1990).


There was a Young Lady whose chin,
Resembled the point of a pin;
So she had it made sharp,
And purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.



Edward Lear

The Joy of Teaching Kid Geeks

At the library, this book title caught our eye: Leading Geeks. As it turned out, there are many pearls in here for kid geek teachers and their parents.

There is culture war in classrooms across the country, pitting pint-sized prodigies against eager, but bewildered early elementary school educators. At times the battleground looks grim, but rapprochement is possible, provided attempts are made to bridge the cultural divide.

Many geek parents will recognize that their kids are a somewhat a chip off the old block. Culturally "insensitive" or ignorant teachers may brand these children simply as "rude", "oppositional-defiant", "arrogant", "conceited", "socially inept", "ADHD", or "Asperger-ish". But conventional teachers and these kids come from different worlds with different value systems, habits and customs, and beliefs.

Check out these geek definitions and observations from Paul Glen (a self-avowed geek and now geek management guru):

Definition: "Geeks are the people who deliver technological innovation."

Early Success: "They tend to be drawn to computers at an early age...They are rewarded early in life for their aptitudes and demonstrations...Many geeks as a result retain a somewhat childlike outlook on the world, for better and worse. It shows iteself in their curiosity and playfulness. But it can also show in insensitivity, lack of self-awareness, and condescension."

Life of the Mind: "Geeks love intellectual activities. The engagement of knowledge, creativity, and logic is a lifelong pursuit for them."

Smart People: "Geeks share a reverence for smart people...They hold those with creativity, knowledge, ideas, and the ability to apply them in very high esteem."

Power and Loyalty: Power and Loyalty are "useless with Geeks"...and although "most geeks are relatively timid and quiet people, scratch the surface, and you will find a strong rebellious streak."

Does this sound a little familiar? The following take-home messages of Glen's seem to particularly resonate:

For Leaders of Geeks, or Teachers:

- Make Their Work Meaningful - this may involve reframing reality into their value structure
- Turn Projects into a Game with Defined Goals
- Some External Competition May Be Fine
- Surround with Skillful or Intelligent Peers, Be Intelligent Yourself
- Encourage Interdependence Between Groups
- Include in Decision Making
- Understand the Problem Solving Thinking Style of Geeks - Solving a Problem Helps Organize Their Ideas
- Fight Against Doubt and Dissonance
- Be Consistent
- Do Not Monitor Excessively
- Show Interest
- Offer Free Food Intermittently
- Avoid Artificial or Fluctuating Deadlines
- Insulate and Protect Geeks
- Help Acquire and Provide Resources, Perspective, and Meaning regarding their Work

The truth is, being a teacher or leader of kid geeks is a very exciting and fulfilling job, just like for the grownup versions. But being a great kid geek leader or teacher means understanding that your role, context, and relationship in your job are very different than in the non-geek world.

Brain Break: Guess the Google

This will get your visual associational areas throbbing- play this game by looking at visual images retrieved from Google searches, and guessing what keyword they have in common.

Guess-the-google

Problem Solving & the WASL - Should We Be Loving It?

Washington state students just finished their WASL testing week, and now students, parents, teachers, and school administrators will await the results. Don't expect dramatic changes.

In Washington state, the WASL is a great experiment - a different sort of test that designed to assess applied and critical thinking, and problem solving - all good things, the problem is, the state is scrambling, because this test doesn't seem to be testing the way most students have learned.

The situation is dire: only 32% Washington state students passed the Math section of the WASL (needed for a high school diploma in 2010), and for African-American students, the pass rate has only been 16%.

So what is going on here? And what are these test questions that two-thirds of high school students are failing?

OSPI released one-third of WASL test questions, to give students, teachers, and parents a look at what the WASL is (some cynics thinking a ninth-inning effort to improve scores), but the types of questions are somewhat surprising. Here's one:



The question is: How many spheres will balance one cube?

Apparently only 41% of 10th graders got this one right. It's a little funny isn't it? Not exactly technically hard in the sense of trying to remember formula you crammed in your head in high school, but not a 'cinch' either. We provided our solution in the next post. The funny thing was, we gave the question to our dyscalculic 10 year old (math facts memory problems), and he solved it pretty easily. It doesn't require math facts or multiple calculation steps. It just requires reasoning and problem solving. Hmmm. Maybe that's why all the excitement over this new test.

There are 'good' things in this WASL (there are bad things too - especially for LD students - but we'll tackle that another day), among them: the requirement to reframe data, to translate between words, numbers, and pictoral representations, to critique data or methods, to select essential features, to prioritize strategies for solving problems, thinking logically, and convert real world examples into mathematical equations.

The task before Washington state schools is not an easy one. Problem-solving is an excellent focus for education, it just seems like students and teachers have to make up a lot of ground. And the deadlines for graduation are coming up fast.

Because this post is getting long, we'll try and tackle some of the nuts and bolts and roadblocks to the solving of problems in the near future. We think problem solving instruction should consider individual learning strengths and preferences, and students (and teachers) should be given the opportunity to learn how they prefer or don't prefer to solve problems. In our practice, we have seen that many people with very strong learning styles have special difficulty learning to solve problems different ways. Problem solving is not like rote memorization. If the WASL is really to be the test to beat, then a very different style of instruction needs to come to the classroom.

Taking the WASL
OSPI WASL Site
10th Grade Sample Questions pdf file

One Answer to 10th Grade WASL Problem

There are different ways to solve this problem, but this is the way our 4th grade son tackled it. He simplified the equations by taking the same shapes off each side. The only part that was a little bit tricky was recognizing that he had two different equations that were equal to one cube.

Look back at the Seattle P-I article link below. The critique of Ingraham High's Math Chair seems a bit shakey: "students don't normally see three variables in an equation until junior year." This question required basic math reasoning ability, but no higher math concepts.

Reading Emails Lower Your IQ?

Dr. Glenn Wilson of Kings College, London, has found that adult workers who compulsively check their email are more likely to be distractible and sleep-deprived, and drop their IQ by 10 points. 62% of people checked work-related email at home or when they were on holiday (hmmm...is that supposed to be bad?). The group concluded that although technology can help productivity, workers needed to learn to turn off computer and phones.

The main problem with this soundbyte research result is that no paper is available to review (at least that we've been able to find- let us know if you find anything). It looks like it's from a study was commissioned by Hewlett Packard and Dr. Wilson's webpage describes his area as 'psychology and work productivity.' Is this result supposed to be a reason a corporation will develop a policy of reducing access to email? To be fair, we noticed some work productivity gurus have posted organizational tips that include turning off your email arrival beep, so some people have already noticed its distracting influence.

But we would like to see the data. Were two IQ tests done over a short span of time? (that's a no-no) Did individual workers' IQs actually drop? or were comparison groups just different by 10 points (nominal)? Who did they look at anyway? Office workers? computer programmers? Middle managers? Top Execs? Probably there wasn't any way to blind the study. It also sounded a little dubious that the study suggested email was worse than marijuana use. Maybe marijuana users didn't feel inclined to confess their use to administrators of an employer-funded research study?

Don't put your mail on vacation hold yet!

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Emails 'pose threat to IQ'
Why texting harms your IQ - Personal Tech - Times Online
Organization Tips (including how to ignore constantly checking your email)

Visual Perception, Visual Imagination, and Cognitive Control

Imagery and imagination, fantasy, and magical thinking are powerful influences for many people throughout the life cycle, but among children, they may be particularly rampant, and not limited to storytime, planned imaginary exercises, or periods of creative play. We frequently underestimate these forces at work when children try to make sense of events, make decisions, and have strong emotional feelings. There are some interesting readings here on imagination - both its biology and its influences among children.

In the figure below, we share reduced figures from Kosslyn's group - to show you how much brain is activated with visual imagination and perception (largely overlapping, but some differences)- which means a lot of work and potential for exhaustion. It's also interesting to see that when imagination is activated in adults, it is not just a passive reviewing of previously seen images, but rather an active process managed by cognitive control areas (frontal). Check out the full length report at the link below.



Vivid imagination and personal imagery can lead to all sort of good things for creative processes and decision-making, but they may also lead to confused reality (false memories), distraction, and isolation. In hospitals, clinical groups have used visualization approaches and self-hypnosis to alleviate fear of painful or uncomfortable procedures. Maybe we should think about how to encouraged 'controlled' or 'focused' imagination so children reap more benefits than harm?

Children's emotional and mood disorders are receiving a great deal of attention from pharmaceutical companies, but we would like to see more imagery work and cognitive therapy to teach children more cognitive control. Biofeedback does tend to be more effective in children than adults - perhaps children's rich imaginative lives can help fuel positive and calming imagery?

Imagination Benefits
HGSE News: Who Needs Imagination? Paul Harris
Visual Perception and Visual Imagination

Testosterone, Men, Women, and Mental Rotation

Various studies have shown that in general, men fare better than the ladies on spatial rotation tasks. Here Kossalyn's group takes a stab at seeing whether salivary testosterone levels could account for better performances. The results were a bit surprising. This was clearly exploratory work, but the higher 'T' subjects apparently had lower error rates and faster responses, suggesting the possibility that greater precision and speed of decision making, rather than spatial ability accounted for the differences.

Testosterone, Men, Women, and Mental Rotation

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a way to quickly look how far we've come on the Internet. Check out the Web Pioneers (the earliest Yahoo or Amazon.com sites). Our kids laughed at how simple the sites looked.
Internet Archive: Wayback Machine