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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
It is tempting to answer a gap with better materials, since materials are the part that can be bought. But if a child cannot hold a sentence in mind while working out the next word, a better sentence will not help much. Noticing what is thin underneath, then teaching in a way that leans on it less, tends to do more than another programme. Be careful what you promise, though, because the evidence for training those capacities directly is much weaker than the marketing suggests.
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak (Quran 4:28). Human limits are stated plainly and without reproach, which is a good place to start when adjusting what you ask of a learner.
النساء
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of experiments training children's executive function skills found the trained skill itself reliably improves, with no convincing evidence that gains carry over to untrained skills such as school attainment. A well controlled trial of a widely marketed working memory programme likewise found no advantage over a matched control condition on symptoms or functioning in school age children with ADHD. Attending to a child's capacity is sensible, then, but buying a brain training package to raise it is not supported.
Kassai R, Futo J, Demetrovics Z, Takacs ZK. (2019). A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on the near- and far-transfer effects among children's executive function skills.. Psychological bulletin doi
Chacko A, Bedard AC, Marks DJ, Feirsen N, Uderman JZ, Chimiklis A, Rajwan E, Cornwell M, Anderson L, Zwilling A, Ramon M. (2014). A randomized clinical trial of Cogmed Working Memory Training in school-age children with ADHD: a replication in a diverse sample using a control condition.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
How much of a lesson lands depends on what the child has available to hold it with while they work.
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.
In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.