I saw a guy on TED that claims he can retrain the brain with some exercises so that it can recognize spoken language better. He claims a lot of kids have learning issues due to their brain developing in a noisy environment. That could be ambient noise or the tubes in their ears may be full causing the brain to hear muffled english instead of clear english. He claims this can be corrected in about 30 hours of exercises. My smallest daughter had recurrent ear infections when she was a toddler and it was caused by her tubes from her ears not draining properly and hence the fluid kept infecting her ears. We fixed this with a procedure when she was 2 but it took several months before we figured it out. The guy specifically mentions this as a noise cause that stops the language processor in the brain forming correctly. They have a program for schools called Fast Forward and BrainSpark is their consumer oriented version of this software program.
So, our daughter, now 10 is at grade level and has some trouble reading and doing comprehension. We already had a private tutor for a year who as far as I can tell just reads with the kid and does not much else. I'm not satisfied with the tutor approach and this is based on results for her exams, I haven't seen an improvement after this time. This program strikes me as more 'scientific' with some research behind it so we're trying it out. It's 200 bucks for 3 months, this is MUCH cheaper than a tutor so we'll see if its effective or not. The idea is to do the exercises for about 30 minutes 5 days a week for that time. We're hoping for an improvement in reading and comprehension tests. I'll post more information as it unfolds. The summer vacation provides a great opportunity for us to try it out.
The exercises are delivered using a flash application in a browser. We're using our iMac with some headphones to isolate distracting noises.
Results: Here is an example of the stanford tests taken on Sept 25, 2008 and Sept 29, 2009 after the BrainSpark summer session. The numbers are National Percentile Ranking (NPR). The first number is 2008 and the second is 2009
- Reading: (73, 44)
- Math (63, 78)
- Language: (27, 59)
- Spelling: (58, 69)
- Science: (75, 96)
- Soc Sci: (42,47)
I can't explain the reading. It gotten worse but that could just be a bad day. I do know she is reading a lot now. She enjoys reading books and is currently reading Harry Potter and Twilight as examples. The others improved a lot. So, this is hardly scientific but it's all the data I have on whether it works or not. The reading is the only glitch but on the whole, she's improved significantly over the last year relative to other kids so I'd say the brain spark did help but a lot happened during that year also, could be better teaching etc. I still think it was worth it. I just wish I'd a test she took in May/June 2009 which would be a better comparison.
