From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
Children with reading disabilities often struggle to remember what other children easily remember. This struggle often frustrates, stresses, and confuses them. As such, they often berate themselves mercilessly: “I never remember anything…. I don’t know how to remember…. I’m the stupidest jerk in the school.”
Many children suffer emotionally because they cannot cope with academic demands. But they can develop specific skills to help them cope effectively. By doing so, they increase their motivation for learning and decrease their emotional distress.
These skills form the basis of “self-regulation,” which Lyn Corno and Ellen Mandinach (1983) broadly defined as the effort put forth by students to deepen, monitor, manipulate, and improve their own learning. Clearly, such activities are important for learning, which in the final analysis depends on the learners’ willingness and skill to meet the demands placed on them. Moreover, self-regulated learners understand the important links underlying what they think, what they feel, and what they do or don’t do.
We all worry and get angry, but we don’t realize how much these emotions affect us. Even relatively minor concerns can compete for our attention, occupy our thoughts, and distract us from our purpose.
For most of us, the worry and anger is not intense. It’s short lived. But many children with reading disabilities and other learning disabilities don’t get over it. The intensity increases. This, in turn, adds to the difficulties they have attending, concentrating, and remembering. They waste valuable time and energy on non-productive thoughts, impeding their learning.
An often-ignored but important question about study skills, like homework and report writing, is this: “Why do children with reading disabilities find study skills so hard?”
One answer is that word recognition, comprehension, spelling, and writing, the very things that children with reading disabilities struggle with, require so much of their mental energy that they have little left for applying study skills.
From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
My child has a reading disability. Can the school strengthen his memory? Often, yes.
But often schools intensify the memory problems of children with reading disabilities by not scheduling instruction to improve memory. Effective scheduling would repeat instruction a day to a week later and then a month or so later. It would give struggling readers feedback about what they learned, what they did right, and how they could improve their performance. It would focus on the big ideas, the most important concepts and skills, those with the power to unlock and strengthen future learning. Often, such repeated practice and feedback, called spaced practice or distributed practice, is critical for helping struggling readers remember what was taught. Unfortunately, schools often teach struggling readers something on Tuesday and then ignore it, assuming they will remember and apply it. Too often, they don’t.
Look at his behavior. If one or several of behaviors below are characteristic of him, he may have emotional problems.
Is he:
Does he show:
Perhaps.
It is not unusual for parents and teachers to have concerns about children’s emotional well-being, especially when they struggle academically. Often, though, these concerns cannot be fully alleviated. It is not a matter of “if” children will be affected emotionally, but “in what way” and “how intensely.” For example, because of frustrations stemming from failure experiences, some children may become anxious, others depressed, and still others, angry. Additionally, the intensity of these reactions can vary widely, from mild to severe.
Often, the daily, frustrating, distressing slog of trying to read causes children with reading disabilities to quit. After months, even years, of struggle and failure, many of them see no reason to keep trying-reading is just too difficult. From their perspective, quitting is rational: Why struggle, why be embarrassed when success is impossible? As you might expect, these feelings frequently drench many if not all areas of their lives.
If this is true of your child, what can you and your child’s teacher do to strengthen his motivation to read? What can the two of you do to strengthen his persistence for learning to read, to strengthen his resilience in the face of ongoing adversity?
The terms short-term memory and working memory are shorthand for a variety of thought processes that capture, for a few seconds or moments, information. Unless a child with reading disabilities quickly makes an active, focused, and concentrated attempt to remember the information, he will quickly lose most, if not all of it.
It’s critical that your son get daily instruction in how to write. As Leif Fearn and Nancy Farnan said, struggling writers write better when they know more about how.
For struggling writers to become good writers requires instruction that the writers view as important, enjoyable, and practical. They need teachers who focus on the writers’ progress and show them exactly how they can improve their sentences, paragraphs, and the overall structure of their writing, all without overwhelming them. These teachers need to take the mystery out of writing by showing them that good writing is a structured, step-by-step process, like building a house.
