As a special education practitioner, you're always looking for effective strategies to support your students. Recent research offers a promising approach to improving reading skills in dyslexics by focusing on visual training rather than traditional phonological methods. The study titled "Improving Dorsal Stream Function in Dyslexics by Training Figure/Ground Motion Discrimination Improves Attention, Reading Fluency, and Working Memory" presents compelling evidence that visual motion discrimination can significantly enhance various cognitive skills.
Key Findings
The study explored whether improving neural timing in the dorsal stream by enhancing magnocellular function could better remediate reading, attention, and memory issues in dyslexics. The results were remarkable:
- Attention: Visual training significantly improved attention more than auditory or linguistic interventions.
- Reading Fluency: Students trained on motion direction-discrimination improved reading speed and comprehension significantly.
- Working Memory: Both visual and auditory working memory showed notable improvement.
- Phonological Processing: Surprisingly, visual training also enhanced phonological processing.
Implementing Visual Training
To implement this in your practice, consider integrating motion direction-discrimination tasks into your intervention programs. These tasks involve students identifying the direction of moving patterns against a stationary background, which activates magnocellular neurons and improves visual timing.
Encouraging Further Research
While this study provides strong evidence for the benefits of visual training, it also highlights the need for further research to confirm these findings across larger and more diverse populations. As a practitioner, staying updated with ongoing research and being open to integrating new methods can significantly impact your students' learning outcomes.
To read the original research paper, please follow this link: Improving Dorsal Stream Function in Dyslexics by Training Figure/Ground Motion Discrimination Improves Attention, Reading Fluency, and Working Memory.
