Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
After a course of intensive work, this student's sound skills moved from the middle of the range to near the top. Average was never the ceiling. It was simply where an untreated difficulty had left them.
Hearing single sounds in a word, holding sounds in memory, repeating made up words: all of them shifted a long way once the teaching was right. That is the plainest answer to the argument that a student scoring in the average range has nothing to gain from treatment. If you are advocating for such a child, ask for a period of intensive work and a repeat measure, which is harder to refuse than an argument about eligibility in the abstract.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He taught man what he did not know (Quran 96:5). What a person cannot yet do is treated there as teachable, which is the assumption worth carrying into a case like this one.
عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ
who taught man what he did not know
Qur’an 96:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial found structured sound and rhythm training improved phonological awareness and reading skills in children with dyslexia, so these skills are known to respond to teaching, although that sample was small. Work with children who had low working memory also found sustained gains on the memory measures themselves, while effects on school attainment were limited. Together they support the claim that the underlying skills move, and keep you honest that a shift in scores is not yet a shift in schoolwork.
Flaugnacco E, Lopez L, Terribili C, Montico M, Zoia S, Schön D. (2015). Music Training Increases Phonological Awareness and Reading Skills in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Control Trial.. PloS one doi
Holmes J, Gathercole SE, Dunning DL. (2009). Adaptive training leads to sustained enhancement of poor working memory in children.. Developmental science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If a skill moves that far once it is properly taught, it was underdeveloped rather than fixed.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A display organised by sound rather than by alphabet gives a child more to hold on to. Let them feel where each sound is made, lips, tongue, teeth, and match that to the letters that spell it.
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
Pouring more in does not help while the lid is still on. A child who is exhausted, wound up or not yet settled will keep very little of the lesson, however good the lesson is.