World
of Dyslexia
Newsletter
August 2007
Newsletter
August 2007
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World
of Dyslexia Newsletter August 2007 |
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Research
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Education Shortfall Turning Dyslexics to Crime -
Britain's education system is failing people with dyslexia, plunging many sufferers into a life of crime, the chairman of a specialist Sedgemoor school warned this week.
New research published recently shows that while only 10% of people in the UK have dyslexia, some 60% of prison inmates are affected by the condition.
That's not because dyslexics are pre-disposed to criminal behaviour, but because of the lack of opportunities and education which many dyslexics receive.
At least, that is the opinion of David Atkinson, chairman of Edington and Shapwick School, which specialises in teaching children who have dyslexia.
Search for the Center of Attention -
The brain functions in a way that enables us to pay attention to some things while barely noticing others.
'Your problem is that you see but you don't observe," snapped Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr Watson. The great English detective was making the point that often we don't pay attention to the obvious, even if it is right in front of us, because we are too interested in something else.
The issue of how the human brain is able to focus on particular parts of the visual world has absorbed Associate Professor Trichur Vidyasagar and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne's Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences for many years.
Last month, Professor Vidyasagar and colleagues Dr Yuri Saalmann and Dr Ivan Pigarev became the first researchers in the world to report findings that show how complex interactions occur between two different areas of the brain when we attend to an object.
£100K Kit to Test Reading problems -
A kit is being developed to identify the needs of children with reading difficulties.
Teachers at two schools are working with specialists from the UK Anglia Ruskin University's psychology department on the £100,000 project which will make it easier to diagnose dyslexia.
The two-year research programme is designed to help teachers understand the unique set of challenges that commonly face children with reading difficulties such as dyslexia.
Sheffield University's Learning Research Group -
The group has made two theoretical breaksthrough in dyslexia research, first the Dyslexia Automatisation Deficit hypothesis (Nicolson and Fawcett, 1990) which proposes that dyslexia leads to difficulties in becoming fluent in any skill (including non-lteracy skills), and second the Cerebellar Deficit hypothesis (Nicolson, Fawcett and Dean, 1995), that attributes the literacy and automaticity problems to abnormal cerebellar function.
The team is led by Professor Rod Nicolson and Dr. Angela Fawcett.
the LRG have been centrally involved in support for people of all ages with learning disabilities, and have developed methods, evaluated treatments and informed policy at all levels.
How We Know Where Our Lost Keys Are -
In feature-based attention, neurons form the search patterns we use to find familiar objects in unexplored places.
When on a hunt for Waldo, that dastardly master of cryptic coloration, you probably try to zero in on the color red, hoping to catch the top of his candy cane–colored hat, or perhaps his distinctive black-rimmed glasses. Similar principles are helpful when trying to find apples in a supermarket or lost keys in our house.
Ability to Listen to Two Things at Once is largely inherited -
Your ability to listen to a phone message in one ear while a friend is talking into your other ear—and comprehend what both are saying—is an important communication skill that's heavily influenced by your genes, say researchers of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health. The finding, published in the August 2007 issue of Human Genetics, may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders—called auditory processing disorders—in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them ...
These disorders often appear alongside language and learning disorders, including dyslexia.