A company named Nuance has created a very special type of assistive software. It is called “Dragon Speech Recognition Software”. It can help children (and adults) who have certain types of special needs to be able to transcribe their thoughts. This might make homework a little less painful! School can be really difficult for children who have learning disabilities. Many schools have reduced the number of teachers and paraeducators due to budget cuts. This means that there are now more children placed into one classroom due to necessity, and not because this is the best way to provide an education. … Continue reading →

A study done in Italy found that signs that a child has dyslexia appear long before the child starts to learn how to read. Typically, in the United States, dyslexia is not considered until young children begin to learn to write and read. The Italian study found a new way to help with dyslexia. However, the treatment may not work with children who communicate in English. Dyslexia is a type of learning disability. A person who is dyslexic will have problems reading because his or her brain does not properly recognize and process certain symbols. Those symbols include letters of … Continue reading →

A study finds that children who have a great difficulty with math actually exhibit an altered brain function due to anxiety. That’s right, fear of math itself is enough to make a child, (or adult), perform more poorly when working out math problems. This is a new way of looking at what could be causing what appears to be a learning disability. The study was done by the Stanford University School of Medicine. It was led by Vinod Menon, PhD, who is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans on … Continue reading →

What hand does your child write with? Researchers have started to recognize the connections between brain development, left-handedness, and learning disabilities. It appears that the risk of developing learning disabilities, or mood disorders, has something to do with the way a person’s brain is wired. It has been estimated that around 10% of people are left-handed, and another 1% of the population is mixed-handed, (meaning that this group of people do not have a dominant hand). This means that the majority of people are right-handed. Most people write, eat, and do other daily tasks with their right hand. This is … Continue reading →

A company called ChromaGen Vision has created specialized lenses. It claims that the lenses can help people with dyslexia to read faster and more accurately. Could this really work? Or, is this company simply taking the money of desperate parents? Dyslexia is a learning disability. Children and adults who have dyslexia have difficulty learning how to read, and problems with interpreting words, letters, and other symbols. It isn’t unusual for kids who are dyslexic to have problems with spelling words correctly. Parents of kids who have dyslexia cannot assume that their child will “grow out of” this learning disability. There … Continue reading →

A study finds that there is a connection between lack of sleep, learning difficulties, and childhood obesity. The existence of one of these three factors increases the risk that a child will also experience the other two factors. It could mean that reducing one factor can decrease the risk of developing the other two. A study was done at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. It included 351 elementary school kids. The average age of the children in this study was eight years old. There were some variables that were the same with all of the children in … Continue reading →

A study that was funded by the National Institute of Health shows that the intelligence level of a child is unrelated to the specific brain pattern that causes the learning disability called dyslexia. This finding could change how specialists are currently diagnosing dyslexia. The study was led by Dr. Fumiko Hoeft at Stanford University. The researchers focused on a group of 131 children. The children ranged in age from seven to sixteen years old. Kids in this group had a range of reading abilities, and a range of IQ scores. The study found that evidence of dyslexia was an independent … Continue reading →

Dyslexia is a learning disability. Kids who have dyslexia tend to struggle with reading, spelling, and decoding words. A Dutch graphic artist says he has created a font that can make it easier for dyslexics to read. Could this be the solution? Dyslexia is a type of learning disability. Some would call it a “disorder”. Symptoms of dyslexia include: difficulty with learning how to read, and problems with interpreting words, letters, and other symbols. Children who are dyslexic usually have problems spelling words correctly, and may “guess” the rest of a sentence in a way that doesn’t end up fitting … Continue reading →

A study done by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that kids who received anesthesia before the age of two are at an increased risk for learning disabilities. The FDA, however, feels that there might be other factors influencing this result. A new study was led by Randall Flick, MD, at the Mayo Clinic. The researchers found that kids who had surgery that required the use of anesthesia before the age of two were twice as likely to end up with learning disabilities, (when compared to children who did not have anesthesia before they turned two years … Continue reading →

A study shows that babies who were born prematurely are much more likely to have problems with learning when they reach kindergarten than are kids who were born full term. This means that “preemies” need to be checked for learning difficulties when they are in pre-school, so that early intervention treatments can be implemented. The study was done by researchers at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, and was lead by Dr. H. Gerry Taylor. Overall, they found that kindergarteners who were born “extremely prematurely”, were much more likely to have learning problems then were their peers, (who … Continue reading →