By Denise Ryan
Can online programs really re-wire the brains of children with learning difficulties? Denise Ryan investigates.
MANY students with learning difficulties are either not identified or are misdiagnosed by teachers as being lazy or having behavioural problems, according to speech pathologists and education experts.
Recent brain science research shows the brain is more "plastic" and changeable than previously thought, indicating that students with learning difficulties can be helped in new ways.
But educators say that despite advances in knowledge, children with learning difficulties often get little help. They say this is mostly because schools either lack funding to hire skilled staff to identify the problems and to offer one-on-one assistance, or because they are unaware of what is available to help such children.
In the absence of help at school, many parents are paying speech pathologists or buying interactive online software programs to help their children.
Martha Burns, a US expert in the application of neuroscience to learning, warns governments of the risks of not funding help for such children. "Many children with learning difficulties who are undiagnosed, or are misdiagnosed with behavioural problems, end up in correctional facilities," she says.
Dr Burns, who has worked as a Chicago speech pathologist and university researcher for 35 years, will visit Melbourne next month. She says speech pathologists now get children to use interactive online learning programs as an adjunct to their programs. Some parents are paying software companies more than $2000 a year for the right for their children to use such programs at home.
One of the latest - and possibly controversial - tools being used by speech pathologists and remedial teachers is an American software program called Fast ForWord.
While it is not the only computer program for students with learning difficulties, it is the most popular. It is used by many speech pathologists and is available in more than 5000 overseas schools and a small but growing number in Australia.
Hundreds of Australian children with reading and language difficulties, including some with autism, attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, have been involved in trials of the program. Many speech pathologists such as Dr Burns have found it helps, but some university researchers say more research is needed.
The program gets students to play computer games daily for about 50 minutes for at least 10 weeks. The speech technology slows down words and draws out syllables so that a child can distinguish the sounds. It then gradually speeds them up again. Through repetition, its promoters claim, the program re-wires the brain so that students become less confused about hearing similar sounds or reading similar words.
Sydney speech pathologist Devon Barnes, who sells the American software program through her company LearnFast, says she has used the program with more than 300 children.
A speech pathologist for 40 years, Ms Barnes says many children struggle with reading because of inadequate brain wiring. She says auditory processing, whereby the brain becomes overloaded with information, is a common problem. "If the teacher is doing lots of talking, the brain overloads because of inadequate pathways in listening areas."
Latest brain research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) shows that students should move more and talk more during class if their brains are to function optimally. For children with learning difficulties, who often can't understand the teacher's instructions and who may misinterpret written instructions, the demand from teachers to sit still, stay quiet and concentrate for hours every day is a form of torture, says Ms Barnes.
"That's when you get behaviour problems. Those constraints are very distressing for the child. They get absolutely lost."
Debney Park Secondary College in Melbourne, which has been using the Fast ForWord program for three years as an adjunct to its speech pathology program, is aware of this problem.
Disability co-ordinator Lynn Bentley says if a teacher says, "Good morning class. Open your books. Turn to page 63 and read paragraph four", it is now known that students with learning difficulties might hear "Good Morning" and possibly "Open your books".
"They would figure out to turn to page 63 from watching other students, but wouldn't know what they should be doing," she says.
The only way teachers can deal with these students, Ms Bentley says, is to repeat the instructions many times. Many teachers don't recognise the need to do this, and for those who do, she says, it is "incredibly time-consuming and difficult" when there are 25 or more children in a class.
Ms Bentley says Fast ForWord claims to tweak the brain so that it can process faster - and from her observations it appears to help.
In the computer games, students listen, for example, to sounds such as "ba ba" and must hit the button when they hear "da".
"These students don't hear the 'b' sound change to 'd' for a long time. But after lots of repetitions they do," Ms Bentley says.
She says students with learning difficulties often see the first and last part of a word but not the middle. For example, they might read the word "decided" as "dead".
"Many of these children have normal intelligence. They know they are not dumb but they also know they cannot do the work that the other children can do. They get very frustrated. If it is not addressed they are doomed to not coping in an academic environment."
Bronwyn Parry-Fielder, a speech pathologist at the Royal Children's Hospital, was the first to introduce the Fast ForWord program to Melbourne, in the late 1990s. She says the hospital used the program for two years at an annual cost to parents of about $1600 a child.
Ms Parry-Fielder says the Royal Children's Hospital recorded the results of 58 children who used the program in the late 1990s. She says a few, who had medical problems, showed no improvement. But children with auditory processing problems made two to three-year gains on standardised tests after two to three months. A group of autistic children made six-month gains in their language development based on standardised tests within three months, and some language-disordered children made a 12-month gain in a few months.
"There has been a lot of discussion internationally about the claims made," Ms Parry-Fielder says. "Not everyone is positive. Some researchers think the results have more to do with the intensity of the program than the program itself."
A 2001 study, which examined five earlier studies of Fast ForWord, concluded that the improvements in language abilities were not from changes in temporal processing and that more research was needed.
But a recent Stanford University study using FMRI concluded that the program helped children with dyslexia. A West Australian trial of 144 students at four primary schools for 10 weeks last year also showed gains for some children.
Genevieve McArthur, a research fellow at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, recently reviewed 15 published studies on Fast ForWord. She concluded that only two of them had the necessary controls and that they didn't conclusively show benefits to reading or language.
Lynn Bentley attributes the gains made by the 13 children identified with severe language disorder at Debney Park to using Fast ForWord as part of a broader speech pathology program.
"I don't know anywhere else that is getting such students to age-appropriate levels," she says.
Parents may feel confused by these conflicting claims but for many, paying for help is the only option. Ms Bentley says many students who need help miss out because it is so difficult to get individual funding through the state education department to provide intensive daily therapy.
The State Government used to fund such students if they scored 70 or below on two language tests but, she says, this was cut three years ago to assist only students who scored 55 or below. The average person would score 85 to 115 on such tests.
When the funding was altered, the Government related funding to the number of students in years 7 to 9. "The only way to get individual funding is to score 55 or below and demonstrate a critical educational need, but that is difficult to achieve as the criteria isn't published," says Ms Bentley.
Clearly, more funding is needed if schools are to keep pace with the latest research on learning difficulties.
A study by Caroline Rae, a professor of brain sciences at the University of New South Wales, aims to improve the reading ability of children with different types of dyslexia. Her study is using FMRIs of children aged 8-10 to study which parts of the brain are activated when reading.
Professor Rae warns that the type of dyslexia must be correctly identified before using any computer learning program. Most children have phonological dyslexia, which means they have a preference for spelling words phonetically, whereas lexical dyslexics prefer the written word and have problems with phonetics. Lexical dyslexics are less common, she says, and certain computer programs won't help.
Professor Rae called for government investment in assistance for children with dyslexia as it is harder to help children after the age of 10.
"We know that dyslexics are over-represented in jail," she says.
� Students can work on Fast ForWord at a speech pathologist's clinic, schools can buy the program or parents can buy it to use at home. It is available in Victoria through two companies, LearnFast in Sydney and Sonic Hearing in Perth.
� LearnFast and Sonic Hearing both charge $2200 for two programs, which students do at home for 50 minutes a day, five days a week for about 12 weeks, with ongoing support provided. If schools obtain a site licence, the cost per student is lower at about $100.
� LearnFast will host a conference, Re-wiring the brain for academic gain, in Melbourne next month.