Comparison of deficits in cognitive and motor skills among children with dyslexia

There is a growing body of evidence that children with dyslexia have problems not just in reading but in a range of skills including several unrelated to reading. In an attempt to compare the severity and incidence of deficits across these varied domains, children with dyslexia (mean ages 8, 12, and 16 years), and control groups of normally achieving children matched for IQ and for age or reading age, were tested on a range of primitive (basic) skills. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse than the same-age controls on most tasks, and significantly worse even than the reading-age controls on phoneme segmentation, picture naming speed, word tachistoscopic word recognition, speeded bead threading and some balance tasks. The overall performance of the children with dyslexia is interpreted as showing less complete automatization than normal.     

Computers and Education: the software production problem

Following an analysis of the stages in software production this paper argues that team production remains the only satisfactory method of providing high quality software but that the key to a higher quantity of reasonable quality computer-assisted learning production lies in the development of support technology adequate to permit individual teachers to develop software within their existing curriculum framework. Three promising approaches—software toolboxes, CAL program shells and software CAL analysts—are described.     

Evaluation of a computer‐based reading intervention in infant and junior schools

Recent studies (Fawcett et al, 1999; Nicolson et al, 1999) have demonstrated that 6 and 8 year old children found to be at risk of reading failure can be provided with very cost‐effective support using traditional teaching methods. Nonetheless, a significant minority of children failed to make sufficient progress. The present studies undertook a replication of these studies, using the RITA computer‐based literacy support system. The RITA system assists, rather than replaces, the teacher in providing support tailored to each child’s profile of reading attainments. The results indicated that the RITA support was both educationally effective and economically effective, with comparable cost effectiveness to the traditional approach when used with infant school children (6 year olds), and somewhat greater cost effectiveness when used with junior school children (8 year olds). All groups of children reacted very positively to the RITA lessons. It is suggested that computer‐assisted reading support can be effective in supporting children at risk of reading failure, even at junior school level.     

Design and Evaluation of the SUMIT Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Arithmetic

Abstract

The technique for creating diagnostic tutors for arithmetic has been established for over a decade, but progress towards the creation of an educationally viable system has been disappointingly slow. The SUMIT intelligent teaching assistant (ITA) for arithmetic was designed explicitly to meet the requirements of classroom arithmetic teaching. Unlike earlier arithmetic tutors, SUMIT is intended to function as a teacher's assistant, rather than a surrogate teacher. It is fully interactive and is able to give adaptive help, diagnose misconceptions, generate graded sequences of sums, and summarize or replay whole user sessions for each of the “four rules of number.” This article outlines the design philosophy and the system architecture of the SUMIT system, and it reports a range of empirical studies of the type, incidence, and diagnosis of “bugs” for each operation, together with a series of evaluation studies of the classroom effectiveness of the system. It is concluded that construction of ITAs may provide cost‐effective and valuable educational resources.     

Computer-assisted reading intervention in a secondary school: an evaluation study

There is widespread concern over literacy standards in UK schools and growing evidence that problems become increasingly intractable as children grow older. Computer-based reading instruction may provide a 'fresh start' that helps a child to rediscover the path to literacy. Recent controlled studies demonstrated that infant and junior school children could be given very cost-effective support using RITA, a computer-based literacy support system that assists, rather than replaces, the teacher in providing support tailored to each child's profile of reading attainments. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of RITA in secondary school with 8 children (mean age 11.7 years) who were initially very seriously disadvantaged in terms of literacy skills (mean reading age 7.3 years). The RITA intervention over a 10 week period led to effective and cost-effective literacy gains. Significant overall improvements were made in the skills targeted, including reading standard scores, and reading speed, accuracy and comprehension. All children reacted positively to the RITA lessons, and most made good progress towards their Individual Education Plans. It is suggested that computer-assisted reading support can be effective in supporting the majority of children with reading failure, even in secondary school.     

Impaired performance of children with dyslexia on a range of cerebellar tasks

It is now thought that the cerebellum is involved in the acquisition of “language dexterity” in addition to its established role in motor skill acquisition and execution. Mild cerebellar impairment, therefore, provides a possible explanation of a range of problems shown by children with dyslexia. The authors have established suggestive evidence in support of this hypothesis in tests of balance and of time estimation. In a further test of the hypothesis, a battery of clinical tests for cerebellar impairment, including tests of muscle tone and of coordination, was administered to matched groups of children with dyslexia and control children aged 10, 14, and 18 years (55 subjects in all). The children with dyslexia showed highly significant impairments on all the cerebellar tests, and significant impairment compared even with reading age controls on 11 of the 14 tasks. Deficits on the majority of tests were among the largest found in our research program. The findings, therefore, provide further intriguing evidence of cerebellar impairment in dyslexia. We speculate that the well-established phonological deficits in dyslexia may arise initially from inefficient articulatory control attributable to cerebellar impairment.     

Persistence of phonological awareness deficits in older children with dyslexia

Three groups of children with dyslexia, with mean age 8, 13 and 17 years, together with three groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ with the dyslexic groups, undertook tests of sound categorization and phoneme deletion. The design allowed comparison not only across chronological age but also across reading age. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse even than their reading age controls on both tasks. Indeed, overall performance of the 17 year old children with dyslexia was closest, but inferior, to that of the 8 year old controls. Since the sound categorization task was designed to minimize working memory load, the results extend previous findings on the phonological awareness deficits in dyslexia by dissociating the deficit from memory load and by showing that it persists at least into late adolescence.     

Vocabulary training for children with dyslexia

A vocabulary training program, using the parents as sole instructors, led to significant and lasting improvements in word knowledge and lexical access speed for 13 adolescents with dyslexia. Furthermore, when the trained words matched the current vocabulary age of the child, the improvement generalized to untrained words.