Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I What is Reading, and What are Reading Disorders? Looking to Neuroscience, Evolution, and Genetics
- Part II Reading and the Growing Brain: Methodology and History
- 4 A brief history of time, phonology, and other explanations of developmental dyslexia
- 5 Approaches to behavioral and neurological research on learning disabilities: in search of a deeper synthesis
- 6 Growth cycles of mind and brain: analyzing developmental pathways of learning disorders
- Essay: Cycles and gradients in development of the cortex
- 7 Brain bases of reading disabilities
- 8 The neural correlates of reading disorder: functional magnetic resonance imaging
- 9 Patterns of cortical connection in children with learning problems
- Essay: The role of experience in brain development: adverse effects of childhood maltreatment
- Part III Watching Children Read
- Part IV Reading Skills in the Long Term
- Appendix: Transcript and behavioral data from Profiles in Reading Skills (Four Boys)
- Index
6 - Growth cycles of mind and brain: analyzing developmental pathways of learning disorders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I What is Reading, and What are Reading Disorders? Looking to Neuroscience, Evolution, and Genetics
- Part II Reading and the Growing Brain: Methodology and History
- 4 A brief history of time, phonology, and other explanations of developmental dyslexia
- 5 Approaches to behavioral and neurological research on learning disabilities: in search of a deeper synthesis
- 6 Growth cycles of mind and brain: analyzing developmental pathways of learning disorders
- Essay: Cycles and gradients in development of the cortex
- 7 Brain bases of reading disabilities
- 8 The neural correlates of reading disorder: functional magnetic resonance imaging
- 9 Patterns of cortical connection in children with learning problems
- Essay: The role of experience in brain development: adverse effects of childhood maltreatment
- Part III Watching Children Read
- Part IV Reading Skills in the Long Term
- Appendix: Transcript and behavioral data from Profiles in Reading Skills (Four Boys)
- Index
Summary
Overview: Development is not a linear process, but a dynamic interaction between the individual's mind, brain, and social and physical environments. Considering learning disorders from this dynamic, situated perspective is especially important, because many of children's abilities to compensate for perceptual or cognitive difficulties are constructed from the properties of this interaction. For this reason, dynamic models hold great promise in helping us to understand development in learning disorders. They contribute powerful tools for assessing diverse developmental pathways in all their real-life complexity, without separating the individual's mind and brain from his or her environment. Furthermore, dynamic models enable us to conceptualize and measure development in terms of recurrent growth cycles, bringing assessment of children's developing minds and brains together under one framework. Research on electrical activity in the cortex demonstrates such growth cycles in brain growth, which seem to parallel the cognitive cycles, as discussed by Robert Thatcher in an essay for this chapter. The dynamic framework for analyzing pathways of growth provides an important conceptual and methodological advance in our ability to make connections between neurological and cognitive growth, which will have major educational implications for learning-disabled children.
The EditorsIn recent years developmental science has been transformed – from a relatively static framework that assumes stable skills and slow, linear change to a dynamic framework that focuses on change and variation in development and activity (Fischer & Bidell, 1998; Fischer, Yan, & Stewart, 2003; Thelen & Smith, 1994; van Geert, 1998).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders , pp. 101 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
- 12
- Cited by