Study Raises Concerns on Crossing Streets for Children with ADHD

A new study reported in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, looks at a potentially dangerous consequence for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder -- the simple act of crossing the street.

The study looked at a total of 78 children, from 7-10 years of age, half of whom had been diagnosed with ADHD-Combined Type, which includes symptoms of both inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity. The researchers compared the behaviors of the children with attention difficulties with the control group to determine if there were differences in their behavior before crossing the street and while they were actually in the act of crossing. Those children who customarily took medication for their attention issues were not taking their medication at the time they were studied.

The researchers found that while the children with attention difficulties "evaluated the crossing environment" and began to cross the street in the same way as the control group, they crossed when there were smaller gaps in traffic and had significantly less time to spare when they reached the other side of the street. The dangers of this situation in a real life situation are clear to every parent.

When the researchers looked at the possible reasons for this dangerous difference in how children with attention difficulties crossed the street, they determined that it was weakness in executive function, specifically difficulties in managing time. They discounted inattention itself, or oppositional behaviors, as the key factors impacting poor decisions as to when it was safe to cross.

While the researchers note that work needs to be done to remediate the executive deficits that are the basis for this danger, it is on parents -- through practice with their children, hand-holding where appropriate, and modeling safe crossing behaviors, to whom the task of keeping their kids safe will fall. School opens in a few weeks. Please drive carefully.


Photo used under Creative Commons by Elizabeth/Table4Five

More Friday Spelling - Spelling City: A Cool Tool

Fed up with the same tired spelling drills? A great resource for early readers and writers is Spelling City, a free website that allows students to learn and practice early spelling and decoding skills in a fun, motivating way.

After registering as a teacher, parent, or student, users can enter and save their own lists of words or work from pre-existing lists entered by other users. To use the words for practice in spelling and other literacy skills, a multitude of games are available, including the perennially popular Hangman spin-off “Hang Mouse.” The graphics and sound effects are simple but appealing, and students will enjoy the change of pace in their spelling practice.

One particularly valuable feature of the website is the "Spelling Test" option. Students can take a test in which the word will be dictated to them and presented orally in a sentence. Once they’ve completed the test, any words they’ve spelled incorrectly will be marked, with the correct spelling written next to it and a “Teach Me” option next to the error. After relearning the word, the student can choose to take another test, either with all the words or focusing only on incorrect responses. Spelling City can be used as a collaborative teaching tool as well. If a list is made public, others can search for it by name and play games with the words on it. This is particularly valuable when teachers enter words lists for their students to use, helping to bridge the gap between school and home.

Premium memberships, available for $24.99 a year, allow users access to even more features, like vocabulary tests and flashcards for the words on a user’s personal lists.


Photo used under Creative Commons by woodleywonderworks

A Home Office for Students

A recent article in The Costco Connection, the magazine distributed by the warehouse chain to its customers, suggests that families set up a "home office for homework," something we think is a terrific idea. If you think about it, homework and school are a student's job and, just like a parent who may need a dedicated home office space to do the work of his or her job at home -- full-time or outside the regular work day -- students need a dedicated space to enable them to work most efficiently.

Whether this student office is in the student's own room, or in a more public part of the home, is a decision that families need to make based on the age of the student, the space available, and a particular student's need for direct supervision and ease of distraction. But even when families decide that the kitchen table is the best place for their children to work, there should still be a dedicated area for supplies and storage for each student.

Since this is prime time for sales of school supplies and dorm equipment, it might be helpful to consider the following when you are creating a home office for your student:

• Different students need different kinds of chairs. At our offices, our assessment rooms have both fixed and wheeled chairs, since research has shown -- and we have observed -- that moving about while working can help students who struggle with attention to focus on the task at hand.
• For older students, who may be working for more than an hour a day, proper support for wrists and back while using a computer is important.
• Each student should have his or her own storage area -- a file box with dividers for each subject is ideal -- for papers that need to be retained (for studying for a final exam, for example) but are not needed currently. Students should be encouraged to go through their backpacks not less than every couple of weeks to remove papers that can go into this longer term storage.
• A large white board, perhaps with a calendar, is a helpful way to prioritize tasks and to keep track of deadlines.
• A dedicated place for supplies -- pens, pencils, scissors, glue sticks, paper, etc.-- can be individual to each student or centralized for the entire family. Procrastinators will have fewer excuses when the supplies they need are readily available.

All but the youngest children can become involved in setting up their home office. Taking the time to prepare before school re-opens can help reduce homework battles in the fall.


Photo used under Creative Commons by Lasse Rintakumpu

Teen Brains

We've recently come across an interesting publication from the National Institute of Mental Health titled The Teen Brain: Still Under Construction. It provides a basic discussion of how the brains of children develop, and notes that the brains of young people don't take on the characteristics of adult brains until the early 20's.

Why is this so important for both parents and teens to understand? Everyone knows that teenagers can be impulsive and don't always exhibit the kind of judgment that will come with adulthood. What this booklet points out is the frightening consequences of this delayed maturity. It cites higher rates of crime and alcohol abuse among teens and notes that deadly injuries are roughly six times higher between ages 15-19 than they are for children between 10 and 14.

The key to the information in this publication is scientists' ability to scan the brain and to look at the structures of the brain at different ages. For example, brain scan studies have shown that parts of the brain that control movement mature early on, but that the areas that control impulses and planning are among the last to mature.

Although written for adults, this booklet is designed to be appealing to adolescents as well. It's a quick read and worth downloading and looking at -- and sharing with your teen and his or her still-developing brain.

It's Friday - Let's Look at Spelling Tests

Perhaps no memory of elementary school is as universal as the Friday spelling test. We all went through it -- the list of words in the beginning of the week, using the words in sentences as part of our homework and, on Friday, the weekly spelling test.

The traditional Friday spelling test may result in students learning the spellings of the words on their lists for a while, but as far as long-term learning, its effects are pretty dismal. As with any experience when students cram before a test, most information learned is quickly forgotten again. This makes sense, since student engagement with tasks like practicing lists of words over and over again is bound to be low.

Gary Alderman and Susan Green, professors of education at Winthrop University, believe that spelling tasks must be both challenging and sufficiently meaningful to cause students to remember the words. Their article “Fostering Lifelong Spellers Through Meaningful Experiences” offers the following suggestions for teachers to use for spelling instruction that works:

• Encourage students to use spelling words in real-world writing. Have them write notes to each other, make lists or signs, or write poems or songs that include spelling words. Not only does this provide practice, it reinforces the notion that the words on the list are relevant in real communication. Competitions that reward creativity, such as who can use the most spelling words in a single sentence, can make these activities particularly motivating and enjoyable for students.
• Use multisensory techniques that involve children with words in auditory, visual, and kinesthetic ways. Have children draw pictures to illustrate words and write them in logical format using different colors (e.g. using one color for prefixes or for blends like st and cr). Have students spell words aloud, clapping out each vowel that represents a short sound and stomping when they say the names of vowels that represent long sounds.
• Teach spelling rules explicitly so that children understand the logic behind spelling. Do not ignore the exceptions to the rules, but teach students that most words can be correctly spelled by following reliable guidelines. This will cause spelling to seem less mysterious and intimidating to students.

Here at The Yellin Center, we sometimes recommend Ginger Software which goes beyond standard spell check functions in word processing programs and helps students correct word usage and grammar mistakes as well. And the traditionalists among us still keep a dictionary on our desks, to complement our quick link to an online dictionary.

Online Tools for STEM Education

There has been much discussion of late about fostering education in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math -- STEM. We've come across some excellent online tools to help students build their competencies in these important fields (and have some fun while they're at it).

EdHeads 

EdHeads is the rarest of animals, a site that offers a genuine learning experience that is highly enjoyable too. Depending on the activity, this site will appeal to users in grades 4-10. Students can click on “Choose an Activity” to link to various medical, engineering, and meteorological interactive activities. In the medical section, for example, a surgeon invites the student to scrub in and conduct various surgeries from start to finish. (Graphics are realistic cartoons, keeping gore at a minimum.) Students interested in physics, geometry, or law enforcement will be fascinated by the crash site investigation activity. And for younger students (or anyone with a sense of humor), a walk through a truly inventive Rube Goldberg machine, accompanied by a quiz on physical forces, is a sure winner. These are some of the most appealing and valuable science learning opportunities available online.

Learning Science
Learning Science provides links to lots of great interactive science sites that provide quizzes and teach new information. Far from being a laundry list of available sites, the choices presented here appear to have been carefully selected before being shared with viewers. Some of the highlights include digital animal dissections and a series of oceanographic mysteries which must be solved. Activities are grouped by concepts learned in grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12.

Create A Graph 

Remember when you used a ruler and a pencil to draw a graph for your homework assignment or science project? Like the Rolodex, hand-made graphs have become a thing of the past, thanks to technology that makes creating a graph a snap. Create a Graph, a free feature from the National Center for Educational Statistics’s Kid Zone, allows kids to create professional bar, line, area, pie, or xy graphs by supplying a few pieces of information. Users can view a helpful tutorial, browse examples, or simply start experimenting. Create a Graph makes great finished products for printing and sharing, but perhaps its most valuable asset is the ease with which users can create and compare different graphs conveying the same information. It’s easy for students to enter the same data set into the fields for, say, a bar and line graph to determine which represents the information more effectively. In addition, information can be grouped differently and presented in various ways, providing an interesting lesson in how various designs can present the same data in very different ways. Students can use the site not only to create graphs but to learn to read graphs critically as well.

Visual Literacy in Science - Spatial Ordering at Work

Today’s students are more visually-oriented than perhaps any generation that has come before them. They spend more time watching screens than reading words, and they can access images and videos on the internet with lightning speed. Here at The Yellin Center, we describe these skills as part of spatial ordering, the ability to both create and interpret visual or spatial material.

A small, but interesting new study of students’ ability to interpret scientific diagrams by researchers Erin McTigue and Amanda Flowers suggests, however, that all this experience with visual information does not necessarily translate across tasks to help students understand the diagrams they encounter in their academic lives, especially in science texts. Diagrams, explain the authors, are important textual features for three reasons:

• Diagrams represent certain kinds of information more readily than sentences can. Lengthy textual explanations are often replaced with a diagram; a picture, after all, is worth a thousand words.
• Diagrams serve as an organizational tool, which helps even proficient readers make sense of dense or challenging text. Information presented in multiple ways is more likely to be remembered and understood.
• Diagrams can contain information that goes beyond the text. Supplemental images can deepen a student’s knowledge and understanding of a concept.

The authors examined the use and interpretation of diagrams by students ranging from 2nd to 8th grade. They found that students frequently ignore diagrams or, if they read them, bring virtually no strategies to the task. This haphazard consideration of diagrams compromises the quantity and quality of information students can glean from a text.

Instructional Implications

McTigue and Flowers suggest that educators offer explicit instruction in reading diagrams. A simple measure like modeling the interpretation of a diagram through a think-aloud can go a long way in teaching students what to look for. To correctly interpret a diagram, students should be able to identify its purpose and have some strategies in place for reading it. Also, teachers should be mindful of the diagrams they present; students in the study indicated that complex graphics were often distracting rather than helpful.

The authors conclude that if students are to fully understand the value and organization of diagrams, it is essential that they create diagrams themselves. Just as literature teachers often teach a genre by asking students to write a piece in a certain style, science, math, and history teachers can help their students develop graphics to illustrate the life cycle of a butterfly, the structure of a Roman road, or the difference between geometrical shapes. In deciding how best to convey information, students will learn important lessons about diagram features that can guide their reading. As the fields of science and technology grow ever more prevalent, it becomes increasingly critical that students are equipped with the skills to interpret scientific and other visuals effectively.