Anecdotal evidence? Or case studies?

Anecdotal evidence? Or case studies?

As some of you have already seen, yesterday I was working with a fellow professional, taking her reading performance ‘to another level’.

Sandra was in a way very typical of many dyslexic adults, in that she had been taught and had learnt strategies to enable her cope and thrive despite the world appearing to be a very unfriendly place for someone who had to live with a contrast between the way she was seen by others and her own inner feelings about her capability.

In Sandra’s case this has led to explore, to and to assist many other adults. As she has navigated her way through, she has been able and is able to help others on the journey.

Today I shall work with a young man who from what I understand, has not been as successful yet. He has sort of accepted the world’s view of him, or at least that is what I think is so. I shall find out this afternoon.

With his permission, I hope, we shall all be able to understand where he is and where he could go to.  Well I hope so.  We not make any progress.

What fascinates me is how few other professionals in this area really seem to want to know about this stuff.

I like the fact that I can audit progress and benefit. I like the fact that the biological model being applied is so consistent in its outcomes. I can conjecture on mechanisms and to some extent can explore them further, but this work is driven by a ‘technological loop’ rather than a science loop.  The mathematics of the model is complex in that it is about a complex system where cause, correlation and effect can get confused. A typical biological system.

It reminds me of agriculture. Farming appears to be a mixture of science and art.  The desired output can be seen simplistically as ‘tons of product per acre’. Farmers vary the inputs based on what is perceived to be the ‘limiting factor’ controlling the output. But across a field there are huge variations in conditions. The needs of individual plants can be lost.

Short term need by society might be in conflict with long term need, such as maintenance of soil structure, soil fertility, reduction in the fossil fuel energy investment needed to get the food produced.

The evidence base on which farmers make their decisions is a mix of science and experience. The science research usually originated from observations, anecdotal evidence which then gets investigated ‘scientifically’.  For example we know that fungi and bacteria associate with plant roots to provide nutrients to the plant such as Nitrates, Phosphates and trace elements. But it is easier to do ‘the science’ of how much of these fertilisers we add every year rather than how do we nurture the fungi and bacteria which will provide the crops with their needs. The latter will probably give us a better, bigger crop without the massive investment in fossil fuels of the present ‘science based’ methods. If you are interested google ‘permaculture’ and find out more.

What I do and many others is to gather and apply evidence from case studies which can feed back to science based research. This all occurs within the context of ongoing research and at present seems to not be on conflict with the outcomes of research.

So another one today. 

Perhaps I am a bit like a motor racing engineer checking if the technology will work today in another grand prix?

I think I know what the outcomes will be. 

What can really be done to enable a dyslexic adult? Today’s report on Sandra Fox

Sandra is a professional supporting disabled students. We decided last year to see just what can be done to enable a severely dyslexic adult.

Last September we had a preliminary meeting which showed that there was a correctible ophthalmic component to her difficulties. This was despite the prescription she already had. It was a clear issue which showed up with discussion, minimal testing and from use of the binocular eye tracker.

In September we calculated an optimal computer background setting and decided that we would arrange for Sandra to be seen by an ophthalmologist I have been collaborating with.

Today 6 months later Sandra saw my colleague and we had confirmation about her condition and calculation of what prescription was needed.

I then retested her for optimal computer settings.

Below are some details about the outcomes. We wait excited to find out what happens when we finally have the correct glasses for her. 

Watch this space.

There is a video on U-Tube showing the original consultation.

There will be  detailed report coming soon

___________________________________________________________

The graph below shows Sandra’s reading on a default computer screen on September 14^th 2012.

37.575 seconds for 85 words 494 characters 120 fixations.

4.11 characters per fixation

313 milliseconds per fixation

136 words per minute

The graph below shows Sandra’s reading using her optimal conditions but without her optimal glasses on February 20^th 2013.

12.84 seconds for 88 words.  515 characters. 50 fixations

10.03 characters per fixation.

257 milliseconds per fixation

411 words per minute

What will happen when she has her perfect pair of glasses?

Please keep in mind my comments on crowding, visual attentions span and perceptual span in the last blog.

More details to come.

Effective reading performance,dyslexia and lessons from AMD.

Effective reading performance, dyslexia and lessons from AMD.

What is controlling the reading performance in adults? Crowding? Visual attention span?

Ok so what really controls how well an adult can read?

‘Reading well’ is an interesting idea.

 Is it….

·         How fast a person can read?

·         How long a person can read for?

·         How well they understand what they have read?

·         How well they enjoy what they read?

Research on reading performance it is often reduced down to  the number of words which can be read correctly per minute. But many people can read faster than people who understand the ideas in the reading better than them. So the idea of intelligence gets drafted in. But the meaning of the word ‘intelligence’ is not really fixed so we have discussions and research using lots of imprecise words.

I want to use an idea of ‘effective reading performance’.(ERF) I want this ERF to somehow be independent of the level of education , culture or language sophistication of the person.

ERF needs to be a measure of how fast a person can read a set of instructions to correctly undertake a simple task.  So the ERF will involve the effective interpretation of text to as quickly as possible .

So what will control how fast and accurately the reading will take place?  There appears to be strong evidence that in adults their ‘reading speed’ is no longer dependent on phonological processing unlike when they were young. 

Visual attention span (VAS) 

Visual attention span (VAS) is a measure of the number of letters which can be processed / identified at the same time as each other when a person looks at a string of letters, a word

In young children there appears to be evidence building up that visual attention span (VAS) may have a controlling effect on the development of their phonological understanding, rather than the other way round, which has been argued in the past.

.

Perceptual span  (PS).

This is the number of letters you can see without moving your eyes when looking at a string of letters

This is not quite the same as VAS when looking at a string of letters.  You could describe it as how many VAS you can process in one fixation.

Crowding effects

The way the presence of letters and proximity of letters nearby, affect the speed and correct of recognition of a letter.

Evidences

1.   That how large the letters are in words can affect how easily the letters in words are identified

2.   That how easily the letters in words are identified can be affect ed by how close they are to each other. .

3.   The proximity of lines of text above and below the one being read can affect how easily the line being read is identified.

4.   The proximity of words to each other (the gap between words) can affect how easily the word will be identified.

5.   The  spatial regularity (pattern nature) of the words  around the word affects how easily the word will be identified. (pattern related visual stress.. PRVS)

·         .

·         .

These are just five variables that are fixed in printed text. Evidence suggests that what each person (the distances/proximities/size) needs to maximise their reading speed is personal to them.  The phenomenon being referred to here is crowding.

Here the word ‘easily’ is being used to mean how many milliseconds to identify the word. A measure of speed of processing or perhaps a measure of how little ‘computing power’ or memory us needed.

So let’s think about the way crowding and VAS and PS may interact when reading.

When using a binocular eyetracker to study the way an adult’s eye move when they are reading certain things become obvious.

1.    An accomplished reader needs fewer stops/fixations/photographs to get through a sentence than a ‘poor reader’.

2.    An accomplished reader processes more characters/letters per stop/fixation/photograph than an accomplished reader.

3.    An accomplished reader takes a shorter time to process each letter/character than a poor reader.

4.    Everyone’s eyes appear to stop/fixate/photograph around 4 times a second.

So what we need to do is to find out if it is possible increase the speed of processing of the letters.

 Either as more letters processed at a time (VAS) or/and fewer milliseconds to process each group (VAS) of letters so that more letters can be processed in each fixation. An increased perceptual span (PS)

The VAS will control how big a word is (number of letters) which can be parallel processed. VAS will then influence the ability to recognise and blend the phonemes within a word. Giving rise to a sense of fluency and then intonation.

 If VAS is very restricted then the person is unlikely to achieve a fluency of delivery when reading aloud or in their ‘inner voice’ when reading silently.

If the VAS is processed very quickly then it may be possible to hold in memory (Increased PS) the phonemic components of a word and still blend them hence achieving a higher level of fluency/intonation.

The time needed to process each group of letters (The VAS) is appears to be  associated with automaticity. The greater the reading experience the lower the amount of spatial (edge) detail needed to identify the letter string.

Crowding affects VAS and probably PS.  This is particularly obvious in people with age related macular degeneration (AMD). Loss of function in the centre of the retina, the fovea and macular, creates an increasing need to use the parafovea and peripheral retina to process text. The cells and and organisation of the connectivity between cells get larger away from the fovea.

 As such the crowding effect on the VAS gets bigger and bigger, reducing the VAS AND increasing the time needed to process the VAS reducing the PS.  These difficulties lead to a gradual but persistent reduction in reading speed/performance with the person taking on some of the characteristics of a person with ‘developmental dyslexia’.

Raising the font size which is a common response ends up counterproductive, since that will itself constrain the VAS and the PS ( perceptual span) ultimately needing a fixation per letter. The person reverts to a reading style reminiscent of the beginner reader in terms of the eye movement management demand,

Those working with colour, with adults know that the phonological components of the reading performance of their clients increases in a step like way., without any training. The use of a binocular eyetracker can show the increased number of characters processed per fixation and hence per second.

The issues to be addressed are these.

Does the colour (chromaticity) affect….

1.            The VAS?

2.            The crowding which controls the VAS?

3.            The time taken to process each VAS?

4.       The perceptual span as a consequence of affecting the VAS and the time to process the VAS?

If we can investigate / answer these issues we will be starting to make sense of the mechanisms.

All coming together. Inclusiveness opportunity

All coming together. Inclusiveness opportunity

In many posts I have given anecdotal descriptions of events, interactions that reflect the sorts of experiences which lecturers, teachers, ‘practitioners’  ‘educators’ get.

Students who are rational, collaboratve, ambitious becoming marginalised, even abused because they do not appear to fit into the ‘orthodox’. The ‘could do better syndrome’.

They could not access the curriculum at a level which gave them satisfaction, fulfilment, or were not allowed to because in their different ways they did not fit in.

The move to the use of whiteboards and then ‘smartboards’, have actually increased the marginalisation of many people with difficulties in reading and writing. 

Our experience suggests that there are many students who find looking at a default computer screen far more difficult than looking at a white board which in turn they found more difficult than looking at a blackboard. But there is an apparent paradox here. I say all this but the average academic performance here in the   UK appears to have been rising! But many employers seem to be saying the opposite suggesting that there may be a bit of ‘newspeak’ around.

Perhaps looking is not the right word. It is about reading rather than looking which is more difficult for many . 

Looking at a computer, using graphics appears to be making learning more accessible to more people. But there has been a huge increase in the amount of reading associated with learning. People want to read more, to ‘google’ for explanation, more detail inspired by the graphics.  

There are huge benefits from the use of computers in learning. This whole blog concerns the potential benefits but it also chronicles losses by some of us and the opportunity to really use the technology to make text more accessible, to enable a huge swathe of our people to achieve more and feel more included rather than marginalised/excluded...

In education we tend to see the advantages in using computers as helping the teaching. Increasing /improving the ‘edutainment’   and management components. But there remains a reading 'accessibility' down side for many people which exceeds the positives. BUT that the ability to control the parameters of the text, making it accessible is available.

 We need to grab and develop this opportunity. The educators need to stop assuming that we are still working with printed text, which was fixed, take it or leave it. They must stop making the assumption that someone who can read fast, finds the small fonts on a white background easy are the clever ones, the ones who could contribute, would show what a good ‘teacher’ they were.

 The educators need ensure accessibility to text by reasonable adjustment from the earliest age possible.

Perhaps I am a romantic, but I can honestly say that throughout my life I have never met pupils, students, colleagues or friends who did not want to be able to make more sense of this planet, their lives.

 I have met many frustrated individuals who after years of struggle appear to have given up. Their teachers, the society, keep devaluing them trying to put them in their place. Often it seems to me, when I am not feeling charitable, because it made the people pushing them down feel better to have people not as good as them. Or society tends to be negative towards anyone who seems to ‘hold back’ the seemingly ‘virtuous’. We need scapegoats when the virtuous are not making as much progress as we hope for or expect.

I have met many people who despite being marginalised, push themselves forward, often with tremendous support from those around them, they know that they are ‘as good as’ ( a favourite phrase of mine) despite being told so often that they are not.

I have met and worked with so many people who I admire for their talents despite lack of formal academic success, whether it is the genius car mechanic, the bricklayer, the plasterer, the carer or the street cleaner. When you talk or work with them you know you are no different; any apparent difference is just a veneer. The differences develop as in school they are taught to know their place, and that place is more often than not a function of how fast and for how long they could read.

The computer can be the liberator. It can offer us choice, the opportunity to bespoke our interaction with our planet. It has transformed the way we can communicate with each other, who we communicate with, when and what about. The world wide access to music, film, and ideas is hard to stop, to control, but the real thing that enables ideas to pass in a structured, organised way between us, is through text. With text we can craft our thoughts, develop, demolish our mental constructs our hypotheses and our theories. Test out our ideas; develop our theories, our models. True freedom depends on that access to text. That text has to be as inclusive as possible.

I think that what I have written above is clumsy. I have tried to get across my thoughts. It is a complex area to explain linearly. I think it really needs a mind map!

Nystagmus with a hearing impairment. As he would put it ‘deaf’

Nystagmus with a hearing impairment. As he would put it ‘deaf’

I worked with a young man yesterday who had a problem with the reality that as he read, his head would gradually turn to one side. He had problems reading partly associated with a hearing impairment that had most likely severely restricted his speech development in terms of clarity, sound production. It was thus quite hard to identify in terms of oral reading performance any reading difficulty.

When reading silently his reading performance was much greater but still appeared to be well below his peers.

Talking with him it was clear that there was a nystagmus (eye shaking) as he looked at you.

On the binocular eye tracker this could be seen as he was reading.

The amount of vertical movement in the graphs is a measure of the amount of muscular effort involved in collecting the visual data.

The flat steps in the fluent reader are the periods of time that the eye is actually collecting information about the words and ultimately the ideas being transmitted.

With the person with the nystagmus, only when the eye is moving slowly at the top and bottom of the loop can the visual data be collected.

The reading speed for the upper graph was less than 100 words per minute and for the lower graph the fluent reader it was over 400 words per minute.

The student with nystagmus was putting too much demand on his memory system just to capture the visual data for effective intonation, prosody and ultimately comprehension.

You could not link the reading speed to intelligence in this extreme example. I have met a few people with a nystagmus who were very academically successful; my thoughts then go to the question of just how successful they might have been if they did not have the nystagmus!

When he read from a screen using a lower light intensity and used neutral density (grey) wrap around glasses

His eye oscillation reduced to 50%.

His head no longer turned to one side.

His reading appeared to improve by sitting on a computer chair which gave him ease of upper body movement.  The need to not be static seems important for many people with reading issues.

He was bad, really bad. He would not look his teachers in the eye. Never looked to the front in class! He would not concentrate.

He was bad, really bad. He would not look his teachers in the eye. Never looked to the front in class! He would not concentrate.

Actually he was looking forwards!

Yes another one last week, actually there were two! What often happens with people diagnosed as dyslexic and slow readers is that you can look back on common episodes in their lives.

A very common experience is that they have to hold a book at a greater and greater distance from their eyes until their arms are too short!  This is often described as a ‘convergence insufficiency’. It is one of the things that along with slow reading, somewhat limits their reading stamina. (Especially if they are short-sighted as well!)

A way the visual system sometimes tries to deal with this appears to be turning one eye sideways, so that it not looking at the words being read. This leads to the person’s other eye being pulled to the same side as well and the person finds that they are turning their head sideways in order to look forwards!

In school, this can be very awkward. There you are struggling to get on with the job of reading that book or in your examination, when suddenly you are in trouble…

‘Turn round. Face the front’

‘Don’t cheat. Stop copying. Face the front’

So you look up, puzzled because that is what you were doing, only to be confronted by statement like…

‘Don’t you turn away when I am talking to you! Look at me when I am talking to you!’

Of course if you are really unlucky, you have one ear which does not work very well... the one which is on the side of your face ‘looking forwards’ when you turn your head to read.

So on the instruction to ‘Look at me when I am talking to you’ your head suddenly turns through nearly 180 degrees. Now you can hear the ‘teacher’ but you cannot see them!

No wonder his ‘dumb insolence’ got him into trouble!  He brought it on himself. Didn’t he? Didn't you........

This happens in every country in the world, with every language.

Read the rest of the blogs make some sense of what happens and is happening now.  

Reading funny stuff can be funny. Can’t it?

Reading funny stuff can be funny. Can’t it?

If you are a fluent reader then you enjoy the stuff you read. It is hard to understand why some people are reluctant to read. After all funny books make you smile; scary books get right inside your head, informative books tell you what you want to know. Why wouldn’t people want some of that?

If you are struggling to read this, then you understand.

 You would love to be able to sink into a book, be amused, excited, scared, be transported to another world, another time. After all that is why you like film, TV and perhaps theatre or dance.

If you enjoy those twisting and turning plots get a thrill out of pitting your wits against the author then it really is hard to understand why others do not.

Perhaps they were lazy, had the wrong education, were not taught their ‘phonics’, had parents who could not ‘be asked’.

Ok, so let’s think about those people whose parents sent them away to school, paid for professionals to care and nurture them.  At least they are not risking getting it wrong as parents and they are paying for highly qualified teachers in small classes to give them the right attention, do all the right things if they are having any difficulties.

But still some do not enjoy reading; some give up...so is that what dyslexia is?

If you listen to someone telling a joke, it is not what they say it is the way they say it! The musicality, the intonation, the timing is what gives the buzz.

When you read, the enjoyment is in the way you change speed, change the intonation in your head. In the way you hear /think it in your head. 

If you are stuck in one gear, then it gets boring. There is no fun, the point is missed, or you have to really analyse each sentence to try and work out what it really means.  Possibly a bit like the difference between driving a car stuck in first gear with poor brakes and driving a really responsive car able to adjust speed to the demands of the road and other users.

In that slow moving, ,unresponsive car, where you are always afraid of not noticing what is going on around you as you concentrate on the getting the car along the road, afraid that you may not be able to stop, being overtaken by everyone around you and actually seeming to annoy them all because you are getting in the way… You have to be pretty special, determined to keep going.

What is really annoying, is other people, mocking you, blaming you as if you do not want to enjoy the drive.  Also they always seem to test your memory of the journey by ‘reading and writing’ that sort of kicks you in the teeth when you know there are other ways of showing how good you are.

Ok so if you are lucky, other people like you understand your predicament and help you find ways of getting to your destination and enjoying the journey more. Performance poets and stand up comedians get inside your head without any reading. Seminars can lead to great understanding of complex ideas.

Actually you find loads of ways of surviving and thriving, so much so that you may find yourself competing with those in the smart cars!  You develop skills which the people in the fast cars would never have any ideas about. It might be mind mapping, sentence analysis.

Just imagine that with all these skills, you get shown how to change gear in your car, how to fix the brakes.  That there was nothing really wrong with your car in the first place, just a few adjustments needed... 

As long as you have not crashed, or abandoned the car then the future could be fun, the books could be funnier, more exciting more enveloping, life more exciting and with all those other skills that you have developed, you may well find other people getting frustrated when you overtake them!

Of course this may not be a real possibility, perhaps.