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Dear Guild member,
Now Spring is on the way, you might be considering your continuing professional development and we have a whole host of courses that cover your requirements, details below.
I hope you have been using your designatory letters after your name? If you have not yet been awarded these please either upload your qualification certificates to your Guild record (details here) or email them to guildforums@dyslexiaaction.org.uk
The Dyslexia Review Spring issue should be on your doorstep in March/April and will contain more details of our Summer conference at the University of Hertfordshire on the 29th and 30th June 2016. |
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Training courses
Special offers to Guild Members:
Discounts for Guild members are available on these online courses:
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Work for us in the New Year, New Career?
Our Centres in Chelmsford, Surrey and Hampshire are looking for specialist teachers and assessors.
For more information on these vacancies and opportunities in other areas, see here.
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ART-2 Coming Soon
The second edition of the Adult Reading Test should be published in May or June 2016. More details are on the Pearson website here:
Guild members get a discount from our shop on tests such as Beery-Buktenica, Academic Achievement test, Dyscalculia Assessment and many more.
Call our Shop on 01784 222 339 |
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London Sperm bank bars dyslexic donors
A leaflet from the London Sperm Bank describes a list of conditions it screens for, including attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], autism, Asperger's syndrome, dyslexia and the motor disorder dyspraxia.
More on this story here:
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Can’t count sheep? You could have aphantasia
Cognitive neurologist Professor Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter Medical School has revisited the concept of people who cannot visualise, first identified in 1880. It has been suggested that this may be true of 2.5% of the population, yet until now, this phenomenon has remained largely unexplored.
Visualisation is the result of activity in a network of regions widely distributed across the brain, working together to enable us to generate images on the basis of our memory of how things look. These regions include areas in the frontal and parietal lobes, which ‘organise’ the process of visualisation, together with areas in the temporal and occipital lobes, which represent the items we wish to call to the mind’s eye, and give visualisation its ‘visual’ feel. An inability to visualise could result from an alteration of function at several points in this network. This problem has been described previously following major brain damage and in the context of mood disorder. Now, Professor Zeman and his team are conducting further studies to find out more about why some people are born with poor or diminished visual imagery ability.
More here: |
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How Harry Potter helped my dyslexia
Stephanie Wickens explains how the books helped her to overcome her dyslexia when specialist tuition did not help.
More here:
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Microsoft’s OneNote software hopes to help students with dyslexia
Microsoft are releasing a new set of features for OneNote called “Learning Tools”.It is an add-on that lives in your menu bar once installed, giving students access to “advanced” dictation and an immersive reading mode.
Microsoft says that the tools should be helpful for people with dyslexia, because it includes several different things to assist with reading: speaking text aloud as the current word is highlighted, spacing out the letters to make them easier to follow, using a custom font called "Fluent Calibri" that Microsoft claims is easier to read, and parsing out both syllables or parts of sentences to clarify their sound and purpose.
More on this story here:
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Study finds the Brain’s capacity is 10 times greater
Researchers with the Salk Institute used a brain imaging technology called “advance microscopy” to peer into synapses, the juncture points between neurons, specifically in the hippocampus, the hub of the brain’s memory center.
While prior studies have shown that synapses come in more than one size, and can even change their shape, the latest research found 10 times more discrete sizes of synapses than previously thought to exist. The more sizes of synapses, the researchers report, the greater the brain’s computing power and information storage capacity.The new capacity estimate is about a petabyte – roughly the capacity of the World Wide Web.
More on this story can be found here: |
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Regional School Results Gap is Widening
A new report has shown that where children grow up in England is more likely to determine success or failure at school than in previous generations. The SMF research found that 70% of 16-year-olds in London gained five good GCSEs compared with 63% in Yorkshire and Humber, with such inequalities persisting - and in some cases worsening - over the past three decades.
The report analysed how well children aged 11 performed over three generations - those born in 1958, 1970 and 2000 – using verbal reasoning tests.
Click here for more details and the Briefing Pack.
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FREE guides to help school students with research projects
The leaflets are designed to provide helpful tips and guidelines for young people working on school projects. They are of value not just to schools and students, but to anyone interested in fostering research methodologies and innovative, analytical thinking among young people.
The flyers cover the following topics:
- Why do I need to collect my own research?
- How to protect your ideas
- Evaluating the information that you find
- Search strategy: making the most out of a Google search
- Linking projects to what customers actually want and need
- Research is a messy process
- How to write an effective questionnaire
- Referencing research – creating citations and bibliography
- What search engines are out there?
- Your aim – thinking around your topic
The ten flyers have been produced under a Creative Commons license by the Information Literacy Group, which means that they are available to all schools to download and to use with their pupils to help support the delivery of any topic or activity that requires research and information literacy skills.
Flyers Available here. |
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Spaced Repetition – an effective study technique
 Any effective approach to learning has to be developed with the brain’s inherent limitations in mind. If we know that the brain cannot effectively store and recall lots of information in a short period of time, then “cramming” is a recipe for disaster.
Similarly, we know that the brain preferentially stores information it deems to be important. It strengthens and consolidates memories of things it encounters regularly and frequently. So spaced repetition – revisiting information regularly at set intervals over time – makes a lot of sense. A simple way to do spaced repetition is to use flashcards organised into a box.
For more on this story click here.
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Electronic Toys associated with decreased language skills in infants
Anna V. Sosa, Ph.D., of Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and colleagues conducted a controlled experiment involving 26 parent-infant pairs with children who were 10 to 16 months old.
While playing with electronic toys there were fewer adult words used, fewer conversational turns with verbal back-and-forth, fewer parental responses and less production of content-specific words than when playing with traditional toys or books. Children also vocalized less while playing with electronic toys than with books, according to the results.
Click here for more on this research. |
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Improving attentional control to reduce anxiety
Anxiety can be a debilitative emotion that can adversely affect our performance. People with high anxiety frequently report that they have difficulty concentrating on tasks that need undivided attention and are easily distracted. It goes without saying that the implications of anxiety’s effects on our everyday activities as well as on the challenging tasks demanding our attention are vast.
Professor Nazanin Derakhshan of Birbeck University describes her most recent study into how our cognitive flexibility can be trained and boosted to protected against anxiety, here. |
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Next Issue
Next issue of Guild Gallery will be sent out May 2016 |
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