Sunday, July 20, 2008

Math Research May Be Starting to Catch Up

The regulations for Public Law (P.L.) 101-476, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), formerly P.L. 94-142, the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA), define a learning disability as a "disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or to do mathematical calculations." (from Kidsource at NICHCY)


Since RTI has been evolving, one of my biggest concerns is that the areas of learning disabilities that are not reading based will not be serviced well. There are a plethora of research-based remediations and teaching methods now available for reading instruction, at least for the early years, and not much for the other areas of learning disabilities. I read some web entries today that has given me hope that math may be catching up, though I still question how soon solid interventions will be able to be put into place to assist our young ones with dyscalculia soon enough.

Dyscalculia Research Reveals Possible Cause by Amanda Windom

Down for the Count by Laura Blue, in Time Magazine

2 comments:

Alternative Routes said...

I found reading Amanda Windoms article fascinating specially as a Davis Dyslexia Facilitator who also helps people with dyscalculia. I have in fact used the Davis Maths Programme, which recognises that an individual may have problems clearly understanding concepts such as change/consequence/time/sequence. The individual then can go on and have improvement with Reading showing that the cause of both come from the same route cause. As facilitators we already recognise that the individual may have problems with language processing difficulty and that it is their gift of visual/spatial thinking style that creates the dyslexia/dyscalculia. More importantly we also know how they can bring about change to their learning difficulties. To find out more read the books The Gift of Learnig and The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis, it works.

Marja said...

Thanks for the interesting articles. it is so important all this research. The problem is that society is so far behing on what they already know and knowledge is so important so that teachers can accomodate these children because they learn differently. There is already in this area a lot of research done in the Occupational therapy area. they should all work together to speed up things.
BTW I saw another one of richards (rick) Lavoie's video's yesterday He is an expert in LD You probably know him otherwise google him. They are very helpful for teachers too to understand LD