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IS YOUR CHILD DYSLEXIC?

Time Magazine July 28, 2003

AGES 3-5 DOES YOUR PRESCHOOLER: seem uninterested in playing games with language sounds, such as repetition and rhyming? Do they have trouble learning nursery rhymes, such as Humpty Dumpty or Jack and Jill? Do they frequently mispronounce words and persist in using baby talk? Do they fail to recognize the letters in his or her name? Do they have trouble remembering the names of letters, numbers or days of the week?

AGES 5-6 DOES YOUR KINDERGARTNER: fail to recognize and write letters, write his or hier name or use invented spelling for words? Do they have trouble breaking spoken words into syllables, such as cowboy into cow and boy? Do they still have trouble recognizing words that rhyme, sucjh as cat and bat?Do they fail to connect letters and sounds?( ask your child what does the letter b sound like) Do they fail to recognize phonemes? (ask your child what starts with the same sound as cat, dog, man or bird?)

Ages 6-7 DOES YOUR FIRST GRADER: have difficulty recognizing and manipulating phonemes? Fail to read common one syllable words such as mat or top? Make reading errors that suggest a failure to connect sounds and letters, such as big for goat? Do they fail to recognize common, irregularly spelled words, such as said, where and two? Complain about how hard reading is and refuse to do it?

Ages 7 and older: mispronounce long or complicated words, saying "amulium" instead of "aluminum"? Confuse words that sound alike, such at tornado for volcano, or lotion for ocean? Speak haltingly and overuse vague words such as stuff or things? Have trouble remembering dates, names and telephone numbers? Have trouble reading small function words such as that, an and in? Guess wildly when reading multiple syllable words instead of sounding them out? Skip parts of words, reading conible instead of convertible for example? When reading aloud often substitute easy words for hard ones such as car for automobile? Spell terribly and have messy handwriting? Have trouble completing homework or finishing tests on time? Have a deep fear of reading aloud?

ROLE MODELS OF PEOPLE WITH DYSLEXIA: Dyslexia didn't hold back Thomas Edison, Agatha Christie, Tom Cruise, Jay Leno, Walt Disney or Whoopi Goldberg.

High Score Education/ Games, not school, are teaching kids to think. Reading professor at the University of Wisconsin May 2003

By James Paul Gee
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html?pg=1

The US spends almost $50 billion each year on education, so why aren't kids learning? Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way "back to basics," moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren't learning how to think anymore - they're learning how to memorize. This might be an ideal recipe for the future Babbitts of the world, but it won't produce the kind of agile, analytical minds that will lead the high tech global age. Fortunately, we've got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Deus X for that.

After school, kids are devouring new information, concepts, and skills every day, and, like it or not, they're doing it controller in hand, plastered to the TV. The fact is, when kids play videogames they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom. Learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them. Doubt it? Just ask anyone who's beaten Legend of Zelda or solved Morrowind.

The phenomenon of the videogame as an agent of mental training is largely unstudied; more often, games are denigrated for being violent or they're just plain ignored. They shouldn't be. Young gamers today aren't training to be gun-toting carjackers. They're learning how to learn. In Pikmin, children manage an army of plantlike aliens and strategize to solve problems. In Metal Gear Solid 2, players move stealthily through virtual environments and carry out intricate missions. Even in the notorious Vice City, players craft a persona, build a history, and shape a virtual world. In strategy games like WarCraft III and Age of Mythology, they learn to micromanage an array of elements while simultaneously balancing short- and long-term goals. That sounds like something for their résumés.

The secret of a videogame as a teaching machine isn't its immersive 3-D graphics, but its underlying architecture. Each level dances around the outer limits of the player's abilities, seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just doable. In cognitive science, this is referred to as the regime of competence principle, which results in a feeling of simultaneous pleasure and frustration - a sensation as familiar to gamers as sore thumbs. Cognitive scientist Andy diSessa has argued that the best instruction hovers at the boundary of a student's competence. Most schools, however, seek to avoid invoking feelings of both pleasure and frustration, blind to the fact that these emotions can be extremely useful when it comes to teaching kids.

Also, good videogames incorporate the principle of expertise. They tend to encourage players to achieve total mastery of one level, only to challenge and undo that mastery in the next, forcing kids to adapt and evolve. This carefully choreographed dialectic has been identified by learning theorists as the best way to achieve expertise in any field. This doesn't happen much in our routine-driven schools, where "good" students are often just good at "doing school."

How did videogames become such successful models of effective learning? Game coders aren't trained as cognitive scientists. It's a simple case of free-market economics: If a title doesn't teach players how to play it well, it won't sell well. Game companies don't rake in $6.9 billion a year by dumbing down the material - aficionados condemn short and easy games like Half Life: Blue Shift and Devil May Cry 2. Designers respond by making harder and more complex games that require mastery of sophisticated worlds and as many as 50 to 100 hours to complete. Schools, meanwhile, respond with more tests, more drills, and more rigidity. They're in the cognitive-science dark ages.

We don't often think about videogames as relevant to education reform, but maybe we should. Game designers don't often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn't feel like learning when they're gaming - they're much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country's education problems would be solved.

James Paul Gee, a reading professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy'.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: If you suspect dyslexia get your child tested. The earlier you intervene the better your child's chances of becoming a fluent reader. They need a program that promotes phonemic awareness and fluency. Boys and girls suffer equally from dyslexia and its estimated that 1 in 5 children in the U.S. suffer from it.