Current advances in neuro-science and technology now make it possible to end dyslexia quickly and with lasting results. No longer does anyone have to suffer with the stigma of being dyslexic and miss out on opportunities as a result of reading difficulties.

Fast ForWord Is A High Gain Program

The Nevada Department of Education and The Leadership and Learning Center. (March, 2010). Innovation and Remediation Interim Report: A Collaborative Project between The Nevada Department of Education and The Leadership and Learning Center. Englewood, Colorado. Source

The Nevada Department of Education commissioned the Colorado-based Leadership and Learning Center to conduct an in-depth analysis of programs purchased with Nevada State Bill 185 funds. The report concludes that the Fast ForWord products increased student reading achievement by an average of 22.2 percentage points. This was the greatest increase of all the programs reviewed, and qualified Fast ForWord as a “High-Gain Program.”

Marion County Public Schools, Florida

Students in sixth through ninth grades were evaluated with the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). The students were all FCAT Reading Level 1 or 2, and most were eligible for Exceptional Student Education services. In order for students to meet their Annual Learning Gains (ALG), a component of a school’s grade, the Florida DOE sets criteria. To make ALG, students in this study needed to improve their achievement level, or improve their Developmental Scale Score, by more than the state determined expected gain, which varies by grade. Sixty percent of the students made their ALG with an actual improvement of 173 points, which was statistically greater than the expected gain of 115 points that was set by the state. Source 1, Source 2

Improved reading achievement for struggling middle and high school students served by ESE Services

How can we be sure this works?

Over 20 years, numerous behavioral and neuro-imaging studies have demonstrated that the foundational auditory processing and language skills known to lead to reading failure are highly modifiable and can be brought into the normal range within months using intensive neuroplasticity-based training exercises, disguised as computer games, inside a set of programs developed by Scientific Learning called Fast ForWord, followed by Reading Assistant Plus.

The changes are relatively fast and enduring when used according to the protocols prescribed, which requires well-trained and motivated program facilitators, ideally SLP’s.

Traditional tools for teaching reading, regardless of how expertly and how often they are applied, WILL NOT WORK for most struggling readers, until the brain’s slow and inconsistent auditory processing system is remediated.

Fast ForWord directly targets this and evidence from Functional MRI studies supports it.

Why Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) Are Hard to Spot and How to Improve Them

By Dr. Martha Burns
Courtesy of SciLearn

Poor Listening Skills Or Something Else?

Does this ever happen to you? You ask your child to do something simple, and he or she says, “huh?” For example, you might say something like, “Chris, time to get ready for school: go upstairs, get your shoes, grab your homework (we worked really hard on that last night) and shut your window because it looks like rain.” And your child acts as though he didn’t hear a word.

Often teachers describe a child like this as having poor listening skills because the same thing will happen in class—except that in school the child misses important assignments, fails to follow instructions on tests, or is unable to learn information when it is presented orally. What is going on here?

Parents or teachers may assume that a child is deliberately ignoring them when they ask to have instructions repeated or miss important information in school. But audiologists, who are specialists in hearing, have identified a specific reason for these listening problems. They refer to them as auditory processing disorders, or APD for short.

What APD Is Not

APD is not a hearing loss and not an attentional problem, although it can often seem as though the child is not paying attention. Rather, with APD a child has trouble figuring out what was said, although it sounds loud enough. All of us suffer from this problem when we are trying to listen to someone talk in a very noisy room, like at a party where a band is playing very loudly. We know the person is speaking—we can hear their voice—but we can’t easily discern what they are saying. Sometimes we try to read the person’s lips to figure out what they are talking about. But after a while it gets so hard to listen we just tune out or leave the situation. Now, imagine you are a child and speech always sounds muddled like that. The child’s natural instinct, just like yours, is just to stop listening. As a result, children with APD often achieve way under their potential despite being very bright. And in some cases, the children may have speech and/or language problems as well.

Audiologists have been able to diagnose auditory processing problems for many years. The recommendations for school intervention with children with this disorder have been largely compensatory, such as “seat the child at the front of the class, right in front of the teacher” or “amplify the teacher’s voice with a microphone and provide the child with a listening device to hear the teacher’s amplified voice more clearly than other noises in the room.” Specific, targeted interventions like Fast ForWord are a more recent development.

Although Fast ForWord Language and later Fast ForWord Language v2 were specifically developed to treat temporal sequencing problems associated with specific language impairment, and the programs have been successfully used as a clinical intervention for auditory processing problems for fifteen years, specific peer-reviewed case studies on auditory processing benefit from these programs has been lacking. That changed in April of 2013 when researchers at Auburn University, a leader in the study of APD, published controlled research in International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology on the benefits of intervention with children diagnosed with APD. The researchers not only found that Fast ForWord Language v2 improved auditory processing skills, and in one child language and cognitive skills as well, but they found evidence of what scientists call “neuroplastic” brain changes in the children with APD after the program as well. This means that the children’s brains were rewiring themselves and getting better at auditory processing at the same time.

Speech Perception

To understand what brain changes the researchers found it is helpful to explain first how the brain actually goes about the task of perceiving speech. The first job the brain has to tackle when one person is listening to another person speak is to sort out the speech signal from the other sounds in the environment. That, of course, is the problem we have when listening to someone at a loud party. But that is also a challenge in most classrooms. Children, as we know, have trouble sitting perfectly still and younger children especially are often fidgeting and scooting their chairs around as well as whispering to children nearby. Add to that noise that comes from outside the classroom like hallway noise and playground noise, which even the best teacher cannot control, and a classroom can be a very noisy place. Part of maturation of the brain is the ability to learn to filter out irrelevant noises. But children must learn to do this and many with APD find that a real challenge.

It is not clearly understood why some children develop this capacity to filter speech from noise fairly easily and others do not, but audiologists do know that the problem can be traced to specific regions of the brain, especially regions of the brainstem. These regions can be tested through a process referred to as auditory brainstem response, or ABR. This test allows researchers to measure brain stem responses to sound through use of electrodes placed on the scalp. ABR is a critical measure of sound processing because it provides information about how well the auditory pathways to the brain from the ear have matured and how well they are functioning. In the study at Auburn University, a specific kind of ABR was used that has been shown to be especially helpful in diagnosing APD in children with language-based learning problems. It is called BioMARK. Using this procedure, the researchers could objectively measure whether a specific intervention not only improved listening skills but also whether it changed the brainstem response to speech.

To test whether auditory processing disorders can be improved though targeted intervention, the researchers at Auburn identified four children with APD using a battery of auditory processing, language, and intelligence tests that they administered before and after eight weeks of Fast ForWord Language v2. They also used BioMARK testing before and after Fast ForWord to determine if the actual brainstem response was affected by the intervention.

Results

Their results were very exciting. The children who completed all of the before-treatment tests, eight weeks of Fast ForWord Language training, and all the post-treatment tests plus BioMARK showed marked improvements in their auditory processing skills. For example, the children showed improvements in a test designed to assess listening to competing words (like we have to do when two people are talking to us at the same time) as well as deciphering words that are not very clear (like listening on a cell phone when there is a poor connection). They also improved in skills like listening for sound patterns and remembering complex sentences. And, important to teachers and parents, one of the children showed marked improvement in a measure of nonverbal intelligence as well as ability to follow complex directions.

Those results alone were remarkable after just eight weeks of intervention. But the most compelling part of the research was the finding that the BioMARK results also changed significantly in the children. And the changes were positive, meaning the children’s brain stem responses resembled typical children, those who do not have any evidence of auditory processing disorders affecting language skills and listening. In other words, the eight weeks of Fast ForWord resulted in what brain scientists call “neuroplastic” changes in brain function. And the changes occurred specifically in regions that are very specific to and important for accurate listening and language processing.

Testimony Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, United States House of Representatives

“The really good news: Science is there for those who are dyslexic. As my colleague, Dr. Sally Shaywitz from Yale University stated last year in her testimony to this committee, ” In dyslexia, science has moved forward at a rapid pace so that we now possess the data to reliably define dyslexia, to know its prevalence, its cognitive basis, its symptoms and remarkably, where it lives in the brain and evidence-based interventions which can turn a sad, struggling child into not only a good reader, but one who sees herself as a student with self-esteem and a fulfilling future.” -Paula Tallal, Ph.D Professor, Center for Human Development, University of California San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies Co-Founder and Director, Scientific Learning Corporation Click here to read the full testimony

Fast ForWord®: The Birth of the Neurocognitive Training Revolution

Click here to read the full chapter as published in Changing Brains-Applying Brain Plasticity to Advance and Recover Human Ability. “In 1996, I cofounded Scientific Learning Corporation (SLC) with Drs Michael Merzenich, William Jenkins, and Steve Miller. I coined the term “Cogniceutical” to describe the new type of company we envisioned. SLC was the first company cofounded by academic scientists with the mission of building neurocognitive interventions. Fast ForWord® is the registered trade name of the platform SLC built to translate basic neuroplasticity-based training research into clinical and educational products. Fast ForWord® was the first cognitive neurotherapeutic intervention, the first to be individually adaptive in real time, the first “brain fitness” program that collected data over the Internet, and the first to use computer gaming technologies to change brains and enhance human potential. We included lofty goals in our first business plan for SLC. These included: using neuroplasticity-based training to improve language, literacy, and other academic skills; helping seniors maintain and recover function; helping people learn English as a second language; helping patient populations with neurological or mental disorders. SLC’s first focus became improving language and literacy. Mike, Bill, Steve, and I began this journey together in 1994 with a laboratory-based research study that included seven children. To date, over two million children in 46 countries have used Fast ForWord® products. On any given school day, approximately 60,000 children log in to train on 1 of 10 Fast ForWord Language, Literacy, or Reading programs. We did not know at the time that we were creating what became a “disruptive innovation.” This chapter chronicles this transformational journey.” -Paula Tallal, Ph.D Co-Founder and Director, Scientific Learning Corporation Fast ForWord® grew out of over 25 years of basic and clinical research in two distinct scientific disciplines. One utilized behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methods to study individual differences in language development and the etiology of developmental language-based learning disabilities (including specific language impairment (SLI), autism, and dyslexia). The other utilized neurophysiological methods in animals to study neuroplasticity, that is, changes at the cellular level driven by behavioral training techniques. This chapter reviews (1) how these two lines of research were integrated to form the scientific basis of Fast ForWord® (and subsequently its sister product Posit Science Corporation’s Brain Fitness Program®), and (2) the steps taken to translate and instantiate our integrated laboratory research into clinical and classroom interventions that could be scaled up for distribution around the world, while remaining efficient and effective. When we began our collaboration in 1993, the now rapidly growing fields of “cognitive neurotherapeutics” and “neuroeducation” did not exist. The concept of using neuroplasticity-based training to improve “brain fitness” in humans did not exist. Few clinics or schools had computers and fewer still had Internet access. The methods we developed which subsequently were the basis of over 50 patentswere the first to use video gaming technologies with the explicit goal of improving human performance. Over the past 17 years since inception, Scientific Learning Corporation (SLC) has developed a large series of perceptual, cognitive, language, literacy, and early math training exercises, “disguised” as interactive, individually adaptive, computer games, trademarked Fast ForWord®. SLC products, now delivered over the Internet, include a wide variety of individually adaptive assessment and intervention exercises that provide real-time feedback and rewards as well as ongoing, electronic data analysis and detailed reporting to the end user. A sister company, Posit Science Corporation, cofounded by Dr Michael Merzenich, delivers similar products to aging adults and adult patient populations. Posit’s first product, The Brain Fitness Program®, adapted several of the original Fast ForWord® auditory processing, verbal memory, and language comprehension exercises, including the use of acoustically modified speech.

Dyslexia: A widespread issue in need of support

Developmental dyslexia, the most common learning disability, affects approximately 5-10% of the population. It is defined as an unexpected difficulty in learning to read among children and adults who have received access to reasonable reading instruction and otherwise possess adequate intelligence and motivation to learn. Often first indicated in their school years by this pronounced difficulty in learning to read, write and spell, dyslexic children are often devastated by their poor performance. The social costs resulting from low self-esteem and failure to matriculate create enormous social and psychological costs for their families and for the public school system, as well as a large financial burden for the healthcare system and the government. Solutions: At global issue, huge strides have been made internationally in dyslexia treatment with the implementation of interventional non-invasive brain training programs on over 2-million children in over 45 countries. Here in British Columbia, Dr. Ribary who contributed to the translation of these programs, has further collaborated with the BC school system to facilitate the implementation of such an interventional training platform in more than 119 schools across 21 school districts since 2008. “Fast ForWord” is a series of computer-delivered brain fitness exercises designed to produce dramatic language and reading improvements in children by improving memory, attention and processing skills. In addition to measurable gains in language, anecdotal evidence suggests that children who have completed the Fast ForWord Language program are better able to interact with parents, teachers and peers. As a result of this work, positive outcomes have already been seen in the more than 6,000 BC students who have received training, with an overall gain of 0.7-2.0 years in reading-grade level. Read more about Brain Based Interventional Training Programs and BC Study here.