ForWord thinking

Technology has certainly helped. Today, modern techniques such as brain topography and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) allow scientists to measure brain activity with startling accuracy. So it is now possible, for instance, to monitor exactly which parts of the brain are fired up in a normal child when reading compared with areas that lay dormant in dyslexics.

But scientists and medical practitioners aren’t the only ones to benefit from this surge in knowledge. Now educators are getting in on the act and are already thinking in terms of how to target appropriate parts of the brain when teaching a specific task, whether that be learning a language or working out a complicated maths puzzle.

The findings in some areas of neuroscientific research have particularly excited those working in the field of special needs education. Since the research process helps us better understand the nature of major learning disabilities, it is becoming much easier for educators to engineer effective interventions — essentially a means of “plugging the gaps” where a learning disabled child is falling behind. Research shows, in fact, that early intervention is key to helping those with learning difficulties overcome major obstacles like being able to process sounds or language effectively.

Steve Miller

In the US, education-based neuroscientific research is deemed so important that it has grown into a cottage industry all of its own and is heavily supported by the government’s “No Child Left Behind” policy – one that provides funding for schools to buy scientifically validated products that help children with learning problems.

Dr Steve Miller is founder and senior vice president of Scientific Learning — a US-based research company that uses the latest neuroscientific knowledge to create effective interventions for children with learning difficulties. One of its major successes has been a reading and language programme called Fast ForWord, which, for almost a decade, has been helping kids with deficiencies like dyslexia and low reading ages to catch up with their peers.

“We began working together on a series of projects,” he tells learning post, “and one of them was to look at building a better language experience for kids who weren’t processing aural language well enough, which, in turn, might be limiting their reading development.”

The project focused on why some children have difficulty deciphering “phonemes” — the small units of speech that distinguish one word from another. A normal child, for example, can instantly make out the difference between the sounds “bah” and dah”, whereas a child with auditory processing problems will hear the same sound for each. The way round this, the research suggested, was to modify speech so that the auditory impaired child could learn to interpret phonemes effectively.

At the time, however, the technology available to do this was limited. It was only some years later, after the computer giant Apple invented a microchip that could manipulate speech in a clear and precise manner, that things began to move forward.

“We wrote software and modified speech so that we could set up formal intervention studies in a way that we hoped would benefit,” says Miller. “Then, in the early 1990s, we ran a series of summer reading projects [using the software] and published the results in Science magazine. After that, we had enquiries from about 20,000 people.”

The software, which today forms the basis of Fast ForWord, works on the principle of slowing down phonemes so that children with language difficulties can process them more easily. With practice, the phonemes are gradually speeded up until the child can distinguish them at a normal rate. At the same time, the brain is being rewired so the child begins to process information faster, and that naturally impacts on other areas of learning.

“Our biggest response is not with those kids with severe needs,” says Miller, “but if we can work with kids who are average or below average, we can move them up qualitatively into new categories. So we can make them above-average performers or no longer at risk. When they start to read and do things and get motivated instructionally, then they take off.

“This is not necessarily as a direct benefit of using the software but an exciting part is the improvement in a child’s motivation, an improvement in their self-esteem and what we call the ‘internal locus of control’. In other words, they believe they are responsible now to take control of their own learning.”

While Fast ForWord does not necessarily work for every child, there have been numerous in-house as well as independent studies corroborating the positive effect on large numbers of students. Yet, as Dr Miller asserts, the research is still ongoing, improving on what is already known rather than leaving the technology as is.

Peter Carabi, responsible for overseeing the development of Scientific Learning products internationally, believes that Asia will be responsive to Fast ForWord technology.

“The culture of parents willing to do anything they can to support the educational needs of their child is much more pronounced in Asia,” he says, citing the example of the 1997 Asian crash when supplementary education was one of the few markets that didn’t dip in that period. “That’s a good indication of where value here is tied to education and giving kids opportunities.”

Asia is not only seen as a thriving market, however. Ongoing research into Fast ForWord technology has already taken place in Hong Kong, which found that children with reading difficulties not only showed an improvement in their English language abilities but responded favourably in their native Mandarin too.

All this is despite the fact that, currently, no Fast ForWord software exists in any language other than English. It seems that Mandarin speakers benefit because the language is largely phonetic, so the same brain functions developed through Fast ForWord technology naturally affect the processes employed when using Mandarin.

This also has implications for us here in Thailand, since Thai and Mandarin share a prominence of phonemes and tones. And that’s why new Scientific Learning-funded research will take place here shortly to see if similar results can be obtained.

Back in the US, Scientific Learning is looking to the future. The research there is now focused on developing the processes already used in Fast ForWord to benefit those with difficulties in mathematics as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, gifted and talented students. Whatever the results, the impact of this kind of research on any forward-thinking education community will surely be dramatic.

Australian study finds girls are steps ahead of boys

SYDNEY — They may be “sugar and spice and all things nice”, but baby girls are also better at talking and walking than infant boys, according to a study of 10,000 Australian children.

Girls also interact better than boys and have greater social, educational and physical skills than boys in the first year of life, the Australian Institute of Family Studies research found.

By the time they reach school, girls have often far overtaken the boys, who suffer from higher rates of attention deficit disorder and anti-social behaviour, according to the survey released in May.

The seven-year study, which tracked the development of 5,000 babies under 12 months and 5,000 children aged between 4 and 5, also found the number of children in a family and the confidence of parents in raising their offspring contribute to the child's progress.

“The way that families function, including relationships among family members and parents' approaches to rearing their children, has an important impact on the growing child,” the report says.

But even when boys and girls receive similar parents, boys generally did not perform as well as girls. The report says that confidence in parenting breeds confidence in a child while “a more challenging child may elicit less warmth, and hostility from parents ... a colder, more hostile style of parenting could help create developmental difficulties in the child.”

Robert Johnstone, data manager for the project, said many of the outcomes had been anticipated as other studies from around the world had shown girls outperforming boys at school. But the comprehensive information obtained from the survey could also help shed light on what is a global problem.

“For each child there can be up to 4,000 data points,” he said. “We've not just collected information from the parents ... we also collected information on the mums, the dads, the child's carers, the pre-school, teachers and cognitive assessment.”

Infants with no brothers or sisters had the highest scores in learning and academic competency. Four or 5-year-olds who were only children or had only one sibling also scored best on this measure, but when it came to physical performance, it helped to have a larger family with children with more siblings rated the best. AFP