Education Learning Issues

START THE WEEK OFF RIGHT by laughing at a smart kid, albeit a fictional one. In Monday's Frazz, Caulfield discovers how students fit into the vendor/customer relationship where school is involved. Is he the customer? Noooo... Read it.

IF YOU VALUE WRIGHTSLAW ADVICE, be advised that the apparently inexhaustible Wrights now have a blog where they answer questions about and comment on a variety of school legal issues pertaining to educators and parents. Find the blog.

ATTENTION RESEARCH UPDATE. David Rabiner's April issue is now posted online. In it, Rabiner reports on a study evaluating the effectiveness of Cogmed's working memory training program. Find it. (To sign up to receive his newsletter in your inbox, go here.)

CREATIVE KIDS MAGAZINE, from Prufrock Press, publishers of materials related to giftedness, is looking for new advisory board members aged 8 to 14 and creative, proactive, and outgoing, according to the publication's website. The magazine is also looking for submissions of art, poems, stories, and games. Find out more.

GIFTED WITH WORDS. A couple 11-year-old boys bested older competitors to win the National School Scrabble Championship last weekend, taking away $10,000. Read an account. We didn't even know there was a National Scrabble Championship, much less a National Scrabble Association. But if you go to the Association's website, you can see the play-by-play commentary of the entire competition.

AD/HD, MEDS, GRADES. An article in the May issue of Pediatrics reports that researchers have found that children with AD/HD who took medication scored higher in math and reading than unmedicated peers with AD/HD. However, these gains were not great enough to eliminate the test-score gap between children with AD/HD and those without the disorder. The results, according to the authors, suggest the need for active parent and teacher involvement plus tutoring. Read the AAP News brief. Read expanded reportage of the study.

WRITTEN-LANGUAGE DISORDER VERSUS READING DISORDER. Also in the May issue of Pediatrics is a description of a study indicating that written-language disorder (WLD) is at least as frequent as reading disorder. The article notes that, compared to RDs, research into WLD is meager. You can read a capsule of this article here, but apparently no other content from this article has been released "into the wild" yet, so you'll have to borrow your pediatrician's copy of Pediatrics to read the article. [UPDATE, 5/1: Go here for more information about the study.]

UPDATE: DUMPING THE "GIFTED" LABEL. An article published Wednesday provides an update on a pilot program in Maryland to eliminate the label "gifted and talented." According to the article, reviews are positive. In the program, highly-able students still get accelerated instruction; in fact, at one school all of the students were receiving some form of acceleration. Read the article.

EVERYONE IN THE 2e COMMUNITY knows about Henry "Fonz" Winkler's background and his advocacy for children with learning challenges; he's a prolific presenter. Winkler fans may read a recent interview with him here.

THE REAL RAIN MAN, Kim Peek, has written a book with that title, and he spoke this week at a CEC-sponsored event in New Jersey. Kim Peek's final comments at the event, according to an article covering the event: "You don't have to be handicapped to be different. We're all different... None of us are the same in a lot of ways." Read the article.

SEE OUR DELICIOUS.COM POSTS for pointers to recent articles on additional topics concerning child development, giftedness, LDs, parenting, and education. For example, from this week, find articles on: sleep duration and AD/HD symptoms; a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on whether a school district must pay private school tuition for an LD child; and a neuroimaging study of the reading process, with implications for helping dyslexics. Go to 2e Newsletter's bookmarks at Delicious.com, a social bookmarking site.

MORE NEWS during the week...