| Center for Intellectual, Social, and Affective Learning |
| ADHD Therapy and Dyslexia Education |
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Being successful in school and life depends on the degree to which individuals know how to learn. Most people experience the gift of learning naturally. Others are not so blessed and lack the understanding of how they learn or help themselves become better learners.
At Cognitive Education, we use an active teaching process termed “Mediated Teaching and Learning” designed to develop effective, independent learning skills. Our approach emphasizes both subject area content and cognitive processes. We do not provide tutoring; we help individuals learn how to learn.
Our approach to remediation is to train the cognitive processes that are required before achievement area skills can be mastered. The first part of the program excludes curriculum content to concentrate upon these cognitive skills. Once a student demonstrates improvement in cognitive functioning, a subject of choice is added—such as math, reading, or writing—so that he or she can begin to use and practice the newly acquired skills.
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Customized Learning Solutions
Flexible Schedule
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| Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) |
ADHD is quite possibly the most misunderstood, legitimate disorders affecting children and adults from every walk of life. Misinformation about ADHD has spread through the media rapidly, and as most of the general population either has someone in their family with ADHD or knows someone with ADHD, it is alarming and unfair that children and adults with the disorder are living with being negatively labeled by society and without the accommodations they deserve. Our Alternative Learning Center offers unique, effective cognitive behavioral therapy and treatment that WORKS for children with ADHD. We completely understand the ADHD disorder and how it hinders children from reaching their true potential, and we provide what these capable children need in order to succeed socially and academically. When we plant these seeds for success, these children can and will blossom into fully functional thinkers, learners, and doers! Forget about the articles you’ve read in Time Magazine or Newsweek; disregard the Oprah episode focusing on the “reality” that children with ADHD face daily. Myths about ADHD will be busted; be prepared to learn much more about ADHD than what you thought you already knew.
My child has always been very hyper and unable to sit still. He has a hard time paying attention at home and at school, and he gets poor grades. I think he has ADHD. How can I find out?
As a parent, you have every right to be concerned about those behaviors, but keep in mind that ADHD cannot be diagnosed by simply observing a child’s hyperactivity or lack of attention. Harmful dysfunction must be proven. You would need to get your child formally assessed by a mental health provider to check if your child meets all the conditions of the ADHD diagnostic criteria in the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition).
Attention and hyperactivity—is that really what ADHD is all about?
No! This may very well be the biggest misconception about ADHD. The cornerstone of this disorder is behavioral inhibition—it is the child’s inability to control his or her impulse in a situation. It is ironic that the disorder is named for inattentiveness because there is actually no evidence in science that proves attention deficit exists in this disorder. ADHD has absolutely no effect on a child’s ability to process information. On the contrary, ADHD affects the child’s ability to organize, inhibit, plan, and execute actions without being disrupted. Now, with that being said, this is no crippling disorder. What may seem like the end of the world to many parents can really be a picnic in the park with the right interventions. With cognitive educational therapy, both you and your child will learn skills and strategies to make ADHD manageable.
What is the difference between ADD and ADHD? Is ADD less severe of a disorder than ADHD?
These terms frequently cause confusion because the assumption is that inattention without hyperactivity is called ADD, and inattention with hyperactivity is called ADHD. Believe it or not, the disorders ADD and ADHD are one in the same. ADD was the earlier term that was used, whereas ADHD is the current label for the disorder. What many people also don’t know about is that there are different types of ADHD. There is the Hyperactive type, the Inattentive type, and the Combined type. The Hyperactive type and the Combined type are at different developmental stages of ADHD, and the Inattentive type, which has little in common with the other two types. It is being argued as an entirely different disorder completely separate from ADHD. These children seem spacey, quiet, and passive; have trouble distinguishing between important and unimportant information; make more mistakes in academic work; have memory problems; and are neglected by their peer group. They have a clinical profile that is the polar opposite of ADHD children.
Is it true that children with ADHD will also have other disorders?
Three quarters of all children diagnosed with ADHD will also have at least one or two other disorders. This is referred to as co-morbidity. Some co-morbid disorders include depression, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), and Conduct Disorder (CD). Fifty percent of children with ADHD also have a learning disability. Have your mental health provider look over the symptoms and diagnostic criteria for other disorders or disabilities after having your child diagnosed with ADHD. Other impairments for children with ADHD are: clumsiness and coordination disorder, peer relationship problems, and under-productivity in school.
So… what causes ADHD anyway? Is it acquired or genetic?
ADHD is both acquired and genetic, but first, you should know what does NOT cause it. ADHD is not caused by watching too much television, playing too many video games, eating too much sugar, or not receiving enough attention or love from your family. There is evidence that ten to fifteen percent of children with ADHD acquired it as a result of prenatal injuries to the development of the brain. About one in five children with ADHD is an acquired case, and these tend to be mainly boys because the male brain is more susceptible to injury than the female brain. Research also clearly shows that ADHD is highly inheritable and runs in families. If an adult has ADHD, the odds are 52-54% that the person’s child will also have ADHD. In fact, the heritability trait of ADHD is 97%— it is even more inherited than human height!
What mental abilities do typical children have that children with ADHD do not have?
- There are mental abilities referred to as executive functions that children with ADHD have difficulty performing. These executive functions begin with physical actions that we can observe, and then they become privatized—that is, the child is able do these mental processes for himself; they are not observable. The first is inhibition. Inhibition manifests in various ways. Children with ADHD either cannot stop themselves, or they have great difficulty stopping themselves from responding to an event. They are extremely impulsive and have the tendency to act without thinking. Typical children and adults are able to wait to respond or decide whether to respond to an event. Children with ADHD do not change what they are doing if they are making a mistake in order to be more effective. They have difficulty controlling and regulating their actions and emotions; they demand instant gratification. And contrary to what is generally believed, children with ADHD are not always distractible; they are only distractible when planful, thoughtful behavior is required for the task at hand—like school. For playing games on the Wii, on the other hand, your child will do just fine.
- Children with ADHD have delayed development of nonverbal working memory, which is the ability to re-sense an event and hold it in mind in order to control your behavior. Typical children can sense the passage of time and anticipate the future; children with ADHD cannot anticipate events in the future and direct their behavior to prepare for such an event. For instance, take the classic example of the child who is always forgetting his homework, doesn’t remember that there is a math test today, is always late for school, and always procrastinates to begin a project until the night before it’s due.
- Children with ADHD have difficulty internalizing language. Internalized language is self-talk; it is your inner dialogue that guides you to do actions. Your internal dialogue allows you to read a book silently or make a comment in your head about how delicious your lunch is. It allows you to think thoughts, feel feelings, and keep those thoughts and feelings to yourself so nobody around you can hear or see them. Children with ADHD have difficulty regulating negative emotions; they display their emotions for everyone to see, and they can’t use other emotions to restrain them. You have seen this manifest as temper tantrums and emotional outbursts of disappointment or fear.
- Children with ADHD have difficulty producing quality work without being rewarded. They are impersistent; they have no intrinsic motivation to complete a task unless they are somehow being reinforced to do it. This lack of motivation is partly an arousal deficit. They cannot regulate their arousal, which explains why they become bored of an activity or even fall asleep after losing interest.
- Children with ADHD have trouble with goal-directed creativity, and sporadic problem-solving requires this. These kids are negatively affected in terms of verbal fluency, the ability to quickly form new progressions. They cannot do new, complex motor sequences as fast as typical children. They have difficulty explaining something new that they learned, and they have trouble explaining answers to questions with descriptive language. As parents, you are all too familiar with this: “So what did you learn in school today?” “I don’t know…stuff.”
What can I do to get my ADHD child to function more effectively so that he can do better in school?
Treatments that have been proven to work are those involving motivators such as token systems. These give ADHD children the push they need to make every effort in consistently delivering their best performance. Cognitive therapy teaches conflict resolution and problem-solving skills explicitly and provides children with the opportunity to practice these skills so that they can be applied in real-world situations. These children need to learn how to plan, negotiate, analyze, and evaluate when finding solutions for problems because these skills will be used on a daily basis to solve problems both independently and with peers. Children with ADHD that receive cognitive therapy will learn how to internalize language, self-regulate, and plan. They will develop the ability to produce internal dialogue to guide their behavior; they will use their internal dialogue to help them inhibit impulsive behavior, consider the consequences of their actions, and make wiser choices; and they will be able to develop and use rich language to explain their thoughts and ideas.
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| Nonverbal Learning Disability |
Does Nonverbal learning disability have something to do with not being able to communicate verbally?
No, having a Nonverbal learning disability (NLD) does not mean that the child cannot speak. On the contrary, NLD presents as a child who by appearance, gives the impression of a typical child who can communicate fluently, but has significant deficits in social language use and comprehension. It is a type of learning disability, notwithstanding from many others, in that it exhibits a profile of skills that are age-level or higher, as well as shortfalls. Children with NLD typically have a sophisticated vocabulary and are highly verbal, fluent speakers who use appropriate sentence structure.
What are deficiencies of children with NLD?
The primary deficits of children with NLD include: visual and tactile perception, complex psychomotor skills, and managing novel material. These deficits create setbacks in a child’s ability to explore the world around him by means of visual or tactile (sensory, locomotion) stimuli. Children with NLD rely on receiving verbal answers to questions they ask about their immediate environment rather than independently exploring it for themselves. When dependency is placed on verbal exploration alone, concept-formation, problem-solving, and hypothesis testing are consequently impacted as the child takes “a backseat approach” to learning.
Academically, children with NLD have meticulous difficulty with mechanical and computational features of arithmetic and problems with reading comprehension and science. In addition, Children with NLD are less accurate in interpreting and identifying facial expressions and emotions than children without the disorder. Making or comprehending inferences in conversation or in text is a challenge for children with NLD. These children have the tendency to misunderstand humor, irony, or figures of speech such as idioms and metaphors; they have difficulty distinguishing between literal and non-literal meanings. Although children with NLD have a wide vocabulary, they may not fully understand the range of meanings a word can have, subsequently causing them to use words inappropriately. The pragmatic language of children with NLD is also considered to be seriously impaired because they appear to pay little to no attention to how appropriate their language is within a particular situation, therefore making their conversations frequently inappropriate for the context, disorganized, and incoherent.
Those deficiencies sound remarkably similar to those of children with Asperger’s syndrome or autism. What’s the difference between NLD and the autism spectrum disorders?
This topic has been highly considered and debated due to the neuropsychological assets and deficits of children with NLD mirroring those of children with high functioning autism. In fact, a fascinating question at hand is if NLD could be considered to be a disorder on the autism spectrum. The bulk of the evidence appears to support the theory that the two conditions are points on the same continuum, and one can perceive NLD as being at the very least, on the fringe of autism.
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