October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. As this article explains “Officials have eight criteria to decide if a child needs to be tested for a learning disability, including whether they are reading at grade level, oral expression, listening comprehension, written comprehension and solving and comprehending math problems, she said.
“The problem is the students need to fall below grade level before they are evaluated for a learning disability and a reading problem may not be measurable until second or third grade,” Flaherty said.
However, a psychologist can pick up the warning signs in a 4-year-old, she said. These often include speech problems and delays and being unable to recognize and say the ABCs.
“Those are the two best predictors of later reading problems,” she said.
A child with undiagnosed dyslexia struggling to read can face emotional difficulties as well, she said.
Meanwhile, some “really interesting” new research studying brains shows that people with dyslexia use different areas of the brain when they read than those without the condition. Brain scans show that areas for processing language light up when those without dyslexia read, while visual areas light up for dyslexics “because they have never mastered that basic process of translating print into sounds and language.”
Flaherty said a researcher in the field, Maryanne Wolf, pointed out that dyslexia was not a problem until the printing press was invented 500 years ago…
Dyslexia is not a category under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, so school psychologists would not diagnosis it.” It gets classified as Learning Disability.
As this article Learning-disabled students get firmer grip on college [USA Today 10/17/11 Mary Beth Marklein] states “”It’s not about intellect — they’re capable of doing high-level work,” says Landmark professor MacLean Gander. Rather, he says, their brains are wired differently, so they learn differently. ”
IQs are generally average to above average.
“Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, all colleges are required to provide accommodations to college students. But they can decline to do anything they consider unreasonable. And, unlike grade schools and high schools, which are required by law to identify, evaluate and help students with disabilities, colleges don’t have to do anything — unless a student asks for help and provides proof of a learning disability.”
“Nearly nine out of 10 of the nation’s two- and four-year colleges enroll students with disabilities, and of the 86% of those that enroll students with learning disabilities, only 24% say they can help disabled students “to a major extent,” says an Education Department report published in June.
That’s why a growing number of short-term opportunities are cropping up to help college students with learning disabilities hone the skills they will need on a mainstream campus. Landmark, which runs three such boot camps on its campus here each summer, last year added a fourth, in Oregon. The non-profit College Internship Program this year offered similar residential programs on five campuses, up from one program three years ago. And a biopharmaceutical company awarded scholarships this year to 25 students with ADHD. Those scholarships include cash plus one-on-one coaching.
Through the programs, students learn to build on their strengths, navigate the terrain and, perhaps most of all, how to advocate for themselves.”
“Many students “don’t have the ability to speak up for themselves, because their parents were advocating for them” in high school, says Robert Tudisco of the non-profit Edge Foundation, which pairs coaches with college students with ADHD. Even when students do speak up, he says, “colleges, to a certain degree, don’t have a good handle on what these students need.”
“Rising numbers
The proportion of college students with any sort of disability has inched upward, to about 11% in 2008 from 9% in 2000, but the number who report learning-related disabilities is growing far faster, says a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Dyslexia and similar language-based disabilities increased from 5% to 8.9% in that period.
Students reporting attention-deficit and related disorders, which affect things such as the ability to organize thoughts or manage time, more than tripled to 19%, making it the most commonly reported disability after emotional, psychological or psychiatric conditions, which sometimes accompany learning disabilities. The GAO report identifies students with autism-spectrum disorders, which have to do with social skills, as an “emerging population.” In contrast, the percentage of students with mobility problems dropped, from 29% to 15.1%; also down were reports of visual or hearing impairments.
Some mainstream schools are catering to the special needs of this population. Sage and Excelsior colleges in Troy and Albany, N.Y., are taking applications for a new online bachelor’s degree program for people with autism-spectrum disorders or other learning disabilities, to be launched in January.
Since 2006, the University of Alabama has offered a program for students with autism. The University of Arizona’s Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques Center has been around since the 1980s.
Why colleges fall short
A number of factors help explain why many colleges may fall short. Colleges responding to the recent Education Department survey cite costs as the primary barrier to making more of those kinds of changes, along with a lack of incentives for faculty to make their coursework more accessible. Other research suggests that some disabilities-services offices, particularly at large institutions, are mired in bureaucracy, exactly the kind of thing that trips up students who struggle with things like memory and self-management skills.
“Right now, the burden really is on the student,” says Marsha Glines, dean of a program for learning-disabled students at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., which is preparing to host its third annual conference aimed at helping high school students with learning disabilities explore their college options.
And therein lies another factor: Most learning-disabled students don’t seek out the services available to them. Of about 67% of such students who pursued college or vocational school after high school, only 24% disclosed their impairment to college officials, a necessary first step toward getting accommodations, says a federally funded study that has tracked students from their teen years into young adulthood. Study director Lynn Newman says those students could be setting themselves up for failure.
“One of the reasons they were able to get into college in the first place (was) they got the support they needed in high school to succeed,” says Newman, of Menlo Park, Calif., who hopes to compare completion rates between students who do and don’t disclose their learning disabilities. Overall, her research shows, 40% of students with learning disabilities, about a fifth of whom pursued bachelor’s degrees, complete their post-secondary programs, compared with about 52% of a similar population, but the data are limited. (By comparison, about half the students who come to Landmark full-time have failed or withdrawn from somewhere else, and 80% of those who graduate go on to earn bachelor’s degrees.)”
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