Short Lecture on the Assessment and Diagnosis of Dyscalculia.

The following information and lecture was provided by Tim Francis in 2017 when he was working as an Educational Psychologist (Tim as now retired). Tim was asked to make a presentation to a group of senior decision makers from universities across London with respect to dyscalculia. To make the talk available to a wider audience he added a voice over to the PowerPoint presentation and published on YouTube.  Tim hopes that you find this interesting. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlybmlSJY4

Dyslexia South offers assessment of dyscalculia in adults and children. For adults, the assessment will be tailored to your needs, for example, it may be linked to your studies and relevant to DSA, or could be a work related assessment.

If you would like to make an appointment please contact Dyslexia South.  

Dyslexia Tutor Writes About Self Esteem

Wise people say it is good to act to change the things you can change, accept the things you can't and even better to know the difference between the two.

You may be a parent or a teacher supporting a dyslexic child. You may be a dyslexic adult wondering how best to help yourself. If so, here is something to bear in mind. The single most important variable that affects the outcome of a person's life is self-esteem. Although prowess at academic and literacy skills is important – and can contribute to positive feelings – they are not more important than a healthy attitude to who and how you are.

A person who has weaknesses in some area of functioning but has good self-esteem is very likely to succeed, be happy and enjoy their life. They will find a way. A person with weak self-regard may lack courage and drive and even find it hard to take satisfaction in the things they do achieve.

When deciding on a course of action, therefore, ask the question; 'What will best strengthen self-esteem?' It might be working extra hard at those areas of dyslexic weakness, those academic, word-based, memory-for-detail, sequential, analytical things. Or it might not. Continuing to strive to get good at skills and activities that fall within ones areas of weakness may only serve to reinforce a feeling of 'I'm not good at stuff'. And that's bad for self-esteem. If someone is trying determinedly to improve, say, reading, writing, organisational or other skills and is consistently finding that they simply aren't very good at them, it might be better to try to find another attitude to the issue.

It’s worth bearing in mind that many skills that are prized in education are not valued in the same way beyond it. School is not the ‘real world’, the be-all and end-all – despite teachers sometimes seeming to believe it is. In the world after education 'getting the job done' is usually more important that doing it in a conventional way. In education, doing things 'according to the book' is usually what pupils are judged on as much as their outcomes.

Also, dyslexics often run into problems when they try to act as if they were not dyslexic instead of acting according to their particular strengths and weaknesses. They are often people who are good at finding their own idiosyncratic ways of doing things. Sometimes these are better than the 'normal' ways of doing them. Often it is an imposed procedure, someone else’s idea of how a task should be done, that is the issue for the dyslexic. It is good to look at tasks and ask what the required outcome is. Sometimes the dyslexic can find another way. And sometimes they don’t need to do it at all

So: act to change the things you can change. If you can improve in a particular skill area, it is good to do so – and good to get help from a dyslexia specialist if s/he can assist in this. This will strengthen self-esteem. But do learn to accept the things you can’t change. There comes a time when you should say; ‘I’m simply not so good at this, I’ll leave it to others to do – or find a way to do it that suits me’. 

This prevents positive self-esteem being damaged or negative self-esteem being reinforced.

And it is OK to be good at some things and not so good at others. Strive to develop a philosophy that distinguishes between those things you can get better at and those you don’t need to try to. Learn to judge yourself by your own values, not those of others. It is good for self-esteem. And self-esteem is the single most important variable that affects the outcome of a person's life.

Written by Simon Hopper

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Origins Of Visual Stress (Meares-Irlen Syndrome)

A teacher in New Zealand, Olive Meares, was the first to provide a detailed written account of the spatial distortions affecting text being read by some individuals.  Olive Meares also reported that the effects she cited could be reduced or eliminated by the use of coloured paper or by using coloured plastic overlays; the overlay is placed over the text to be read.

A psychologist working in California, Helen Irlen, wrote a paper describing symptoms similar to Olive Meares.  Ms Irlen, named the effects as Scotopic Sensitivity or Irlen Syndrome.  The syndrome was one in which reading is impeded by distortions of print. She reported that the distortions were positively effected if text was viewed through a coloured filter or overlay.  Ms Irlen went further and established a protocol for screening for scotopic sensitivity and a system for dispensing coloured overlays as a result of the assessment.

There followed a period of time during which the scientific community discussed these findings with a great deal of skepticism.  Prof. Wilkins and colleagues of Essex University were amongst the first to apply scientific rigor to the study of scotopic sensitivity or Meares-Irlen Syndrome, as it had become known.  The Essex University team set up double blind placebo controlled trials and went on to establish a number of tools for screening for scotopic sensitivity and quantifying the effects of coloured overlays. 

In the past, specialist assessors and educational psychologists with special training were able to assess and provide a coloured overlay for use when reading. Now this is not recommended, and if there are symptoms of visual stress then an in-depth optometry assessment should be sought. This should include assessment of binocular vision (accommodation and convergence) disorders, and visual stress, in addition to the standard sight-test comprising refraction and ocular health assessment.

If you or your child is experiencing visual effects such as text wobbling, moving, flickering, blocking out, underlining, halo effects, head aches and/or a feeling of over brightness, then it would be useful to have a specialist optometry assessment. You can ask if your usual optician is able to offer this service, or follow this link to BABO who have a map of behavioural optometrists.

Lazy Children

I often see children who are referred to as being lazy.  I have conducted many adults who have grown up thinking they were lazy.  A whole sea of lazy children and adults, but the strange thing was that every single one had a specific difficulty of some kind.

An average referral went along these lines:  He is just lazy, he can do the work, but sometimes decides that he just doesn't want to do the work.  A series of detailed questions follow and it seems that there are occasions when the child is very happy to do the work and others when he baulks.  There are occasions when he has worked well and then seems to stop.  What seems to happen then is that threats of punishment are made, or punishments given with more to come.  The child then reluctantly does more work, thus providing proof that he was just being lazy.  All that was needed was teacher discipline and all was well.

How about this for an alternative explanation.  The child is keen and eager to please adults just like any other child.  Writing/reading/planning/spelling or a complex mix or some or all takes huge amounts of cognitive resources. Yes, they can do these tasks, but it takes lots of mental energy; at some point they will be mentally exhausted.  This is not visible like being physically exhausted.  The mentally exhausted child stops work, or more likely slows down, begins to look around, perhaps chat a little.  They get noticed, are warned and warned with threat of punishment, and finally may do some more work.  This is not lazy, but indicative of a specific learning difficulty.

So what do you do now?  An SpLD (specific learning difficulties) assessment by a qualified assessor or educational psychologist can highlight the cause of a child's' difficulty. If the cause is a specific learning difficulty, this will probably be identified and ways forward can be planned and implemented.  The emotional damage can cease or lessen, and the child will become much happier and gain in confidence. Skills increase because they are supported appropriately, and to offer appropriate support, the underlying area of need must be better understood.

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School Wont Recognise My Child's Special Needs!

Getting your child's special needs met in the UK

The courts have been debating the issue of educational psychologists and teachers/schools having a duty of care to those they teach and assess for years. The Phelps case (July 2000), Disability acts etc. mean nothing if the school won't recognise something is wrong. 

In general LEA run schools have quite limited budgets.The resources they do have available tend to be focused on children with the greatest and most obvious need.  

Often, we see children who raise parental concern because of underachievement relative to the child, not relative to the year group. So a very bright child reading at an average level and having difficulty completing independent written work to a standard commensurate with their ability, would not be sufficient cause for concern and trigger SEN support at school, but parents would be worried.  In these cases it is often best to seek independent advice and intervention.  

How to get your child's special needs met:

1. Assessment by a qualified and APC registered assessor or an educational psychologist.
2. Let the school have a copy of the report and recommendations.
3. Implementation of the recommendations. If school won't intervene then seek out an independent specialist teacher, try the BDA or PATOSS.

The Hostile Child

Stott gives an excellent description of hostility in children; describing hostility as similar to the emotional state of a jilted lover. This may seem a little strange in the context of children and their relationships with those who care, teach or play with them, until we unpick the causes. A jilted lover feels unjustly treated, not deserving of his or her predicament; life has not treated them fairly. When explaining this to teachers and parents the universal response is that the child gets treated more than fairly, in fact people have bent over backwards to help encourage the child to engage in his/her learning and social environments in an appropriate way, but to no avail.

The first thing to remember is that we are never dealing with objective reality, but with the human perceptual system. If a child is presenting hostile behavior we must try and understand how they are interpreting and understanding the world. We need to explore the home culture of the child. Are they an only child and used to feeling special? Are the parents using a parenting style inherited from another culture? Irish parenting is very different to English parenting as an example. Does the child have some form of social comprehension problem? Does the child have a physiological problem that drives their behavior, such as ADHD, a tumor or undetected chromosome abnormality? Does the child have a hearing problem? One could go on.

We will never solve this problem with sanctions, as you may have discovered. Sanctions will, in fact, reinforce the hostility and make the problem worse. Only by gathering information, undertaking classroom and playground observations, and asking carefully crafted questions will we be in a position to review the material and gain a glimpse at the possible cause. We can test our hypothesis by delivering a precisely targeted classroom intervention linked to regular review. If the hypothesis is accurate, then behavioral change will result in a much happier and well-socialised child.

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