“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
John Wooden
As the National Center for Learning Disabilities (LD) describes it, LD is a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to receive, process, store and respond to information. But all learning disabilities do not look the same and, indeed, a student may have a deficit in one area or multiple areas, but not in others.
The important thing about learning disabilities is to recognize that they can create significant barriers for children learning how to read, write, do math, learn life skills and develop their abilities to plan and organize themselves. When there are underlying learning disabilities, they are likely to impact a child’s progress in more than one subject area. Because learning disabilities affect the basic processes the brain uses to receive, process, store and manipulate information, simply teaching more reading, more math or more writing is unlikely to resolve the problem. Development of those underlying skills is necessary and possible.
While deficits in any area of cognitive functioning can impede efficient learning, some common areas of deficits impact many students:
|
Cognitive Area |
Cognitive Skill |
Definition |
Example |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Attention |
Divided Attention |
The ability to attend to two activities and the same time. |
Listening to the teacher while taking notes. |
|
Memory |
Working Memory |
The ability to hold information in the mind while performing mental operations on it. |
Copying a math problem from book to paper, or remembering the first part of a sentence to the end to enable comprehension. |
|
Auditory Processing |
Auditory Sequential Processing |
The ability of the perceptual processing system to send auditory information to the brain in the same order it was received. |
Keeping sounds, words or steps in a set of instructions in the right order. |
|
Visual Processing |
Visual Processing Speed |
The ability to perform tasks quickly – such as scanning, inspecting and comparing information or processing incoming information quickly. |
Obtaining relevant information from a graph or reading the faces of a group of classmates. |
|
Sensory Integration |
Visual-Auditory Integration |
The ability to match auditory and visual stimuli and coordinate them into a meaningful product. |
Connecting the sight and smell of an orange into a single concept. |
BrainWare Safari is designed to develop underlying cognitive skills in a comprehensive and integrated way. After using the program for 12 weeks, students experience dramatic growth in the skills most critical for learning, such as those described above. In fact, BrainWare Safari develops 41 cognitive skills in a cross-training approach, and is delivered in an engaging video-game format, which helps the skills develop more quickly and helps motivate persistence in areas where the deficits are greatest.
BrainWare Safari can be used in a Special Education program at school (for example, as part of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP)), or at home. Many clinicians and learning specialists use BrainWare Safari, along with other interventions, to help students with a variety of learning disabilities.
Case Study of BrainWare with Special Needs Students
