Articles

Below are articles on learning and learning challenges. If you’re also interested in serious research articles, click here.

Understanding Your Child’s Concentration Problems
As the mid-year exams loom, children will write tests to measure how much they remember what they have learned. Being able to concentrate in class is a critical step in the learning process and is fundamental for success at school. When a child struggles to concentrate, a worried teacher may approach parents to discuss types of intervention. Read more...

Solving the Maths Problem
Shockingly low mathematics results at senior school level are cause for concern: the average score for Grade 9 learners who wrote the 2014 Annual National Assessment (ANA) Mathematics test was 10% and only 35.1% of last year’s Matric students obtained a final mark of 40% or above in mathematics. Read more...

What Is Dyslexia Really? Part 1
According to popular belief dyslexia is a neurological disorder in the brain that causes information to be processed and interpreted differently, resulting in reading difficulties. Historically, the dyslexia label has been assigned to learners who are bright, even verbally articulate, but who struggle with reading; in short, whose high IQs mismatch their low reading scores. Read more...

What Is Dyslexia Really? Part 2
Di dunia kini kita, tiap orang harus dapat membaca.... Unless one has FIRST learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia, there is no way that one would be able to read the above Indonesian sentence. This shows that language is at the very bottom of the reading ladder. Its role in reading can be compared to the role of running in the game of soccer, or ice-skating in the game of ice hockey. Read more...

The Brain Is Plastic. And That Is Good News
Your son may be dyslexic, your daughter may have ADHD. Until quite recently these problems were regarded as devastating, but fortunately this is no longer the case. Today we know that the human brain is plastic — that it can change. And that is good news for your children. Read more…

When Children Read Well, Yet Lack Comprehension
A common reading disorder goes undiagnosed until it becomes problematic, according to the results of a five-year study published online in the journal Brain Connectivity. Dyslexia, a reading disorder in which a child confuses letters and struggles with sounding out words, has been the focus of much research into reading. That is not the case, however, with the lesser known disorder Specific Reading Comprehension Deficits or S-RCD, in which a child reads successfully but does not sufficiently comprehend the meaning of the words. Read more...

Dear Diary... A Mother’s Story of Despair, Hope,
Perseverance and Success
Based on real events — this is the mother’s side of story of helping her child with his reading problem as she confided to her diary. Read more...

Memory Fundamental to Reading, Spelling and Learning
Memory is the retention of information over time. Although the word memory may conjure up an image of a singular, "all-or-none" process, it is clear that there are actually many kinds of memory: sensory register, short-term memory, long-term memory, visual memory, auditory memory, and sequential memory, to name but a few. Read more…