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Giftedness and Learning Disabilities |
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Written Output |
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Motor Skill Learning and Timing |
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Summary of Evidence |
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Many verbally gifted children suffer a disparity between their ability to comprehend and generate text, and the level of their actual written output (Yates et al,1995, Brody and Mills 1997). The proposed study hypothesises that for such children, the problem may lie in a maturational or developmental deficit in the ability to translate the sequential contents of short-term memory into rhythmically coherent real time motor action. While no studies to date give direct support to such a hypothesis, a number of studies and theories in related areas, including research into short term and working memory (e.g. Swanson and Berninger,1996); the processes involved in reading and writing (McBride-Chang & Manis, 1996); music processing (Keller, 1999; Ellis, 1992); and motor control (Willingham, 1998; Shaffer et al 1999), give it indirect support.Were such a translational deficit found to be detectable, and to have a relationship to text transcription difficulties in verbally gifted children, it might be further hypothesised that a training program that improved the ability to “translate” the mental representation of short-term memory contents into real-time action could improve motor skills, particular those involved in transcribing the contents of short term memory. Evidence is emerging that such programs can be of benefit in some types of learning or behavioural disability. For example, Shaffer et al (1999) showed improvement in motor control and other academic measures in ADHD boys using a technique called the Interactive MetronomeTM.
The identification of gifted/learning disabled children is problematic. Brody and Mills (1997) point out that giftedness and learning disability interact to suppress identification, each exceptionality serving to mask the other. Furthermore, the concept of the gifted/learning disabled child raises the issue of operational definitions of both giftedness and learning disability.
In recent years, increasingly heterogeneous models of giftedness have arisen, such as Howard Gardner’s (1983) concept of multiple intelligences. These lend themselves more readily to the identification of differential abilities in gifted students, and have resulted in adjustments to traditional Piagetian perspectives. Berninger and Yates (1992) report a modification of Piagetian theory in which Piaget’s concept of décalage (slippage), both across and within domains, is seen as the norm rather than the exception. Furthermore, they report that lack of a normal sensori-motor stage can be associated with deficits in procedural knowledge. It is therefore possible that gifted children, who often show an early fascination with symbolic rather than concrete manipulations, may miss out on such a developmental process, and suffer impairment of their kinaesthetic knowledge of temporal/spatial relationships.
As regards an operational definition of learning disability, Brody and Mills (1997) argue that for the identification of gifted/learning disabled children, it is essential to retain a relative component to the criteria, to allow both for the mutually masking effect of each exceptionality and for the recognition that output skills must be up to the demands of the gifted mind. Brody and Mills (1997) report that while discrepancies between Verbal and Performance scores on Wechsler scales have been advocated as an indicator of written output deficits, no consensus exists over the magnitude or the direction of discrepancy that would indicate giftedness with learning disability. Ganschow (1985), in three case studies, found subjects with low Verbal score and high Performance score who had writing difficulties associated with language learning disabilities. However, as the writing process is a highly complex one, it is essential to discover whether the nature of a written output deficit is a text generation, or text transcription problem, or both.
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Is there a distinction between the ability to generate text, and the ability to transcribe text? Yates et al (1995) sought to discover whether giftedness in writing associated with excellence in both text generation and transcription skills, or only one of the two. They studied two groups of children in grades 1-6: a gifted group, and a matched homogeneous group with Verbal IQ scores of as near to 100 as possible. A writing test battery was designed to differentiate between ability to generate text (to put ideas into words) and to transcribe text (to translate those words into written text). They found that while the gifted group, at each grade level, showed significantly greater text generation ability than their average peers, there was no difference in the mean text transcription ability between the two groups at each grade. The results were further analysed to reveal either absolute or relative disabilities. On relative criteria, 43.3% overall of the gifted group and 8.3% of the average group showed a writing related disability, whereas on absolute criteria, 11.7% of the gifted group and 25% of the average group showed a disability.As the study was designed to differentiate between text generation and text transcription ability, it did not address the more complex writing-related difficulties of individuals with language learning disabilities such as those studied by Ganschow (1985), who may also be prevalent in the gifted population, although the sheer magnitude of the proportion of verbally gifted children found by Yates et al (1995) to have some degree of text transcription difficulties was striking.
Swanson and Berninger (1996) studied the differential requirements of various components of writing ability for short-term memory and working memory capacity. They gave 300 children in grades 4-6 a battery of tests designed to assess various aspects of short term and working memory, and various aspects of reading and writing ability, which they then subjected to factor analysis. They found a four factor model of short term and working memory, in which phonological short-term memory loaded on a quite different factor from working memory, and was associated with text transcription and word recognition skills. In contrast, higher level text generation and reading comprehension skills were associated with working memory factors.
Taken together, Swanson and Berninger’s (1996) study and the study of Yates et al (1995) suggest that for young verbally gifted children with text transcription difficulties, the difficulty may reflect immaturity or inadequacy of phonological short-term memory. However, many verbally gifted children who have text transcription problems are nonetheless fluent readers. McBride-Chang and Manis (1996) found that phonological awareness, which is strongly associated with reading ability, was associated with verbal skill and general cognitive ability in gifted children, and that a major component of phonological awareness was phonological short-term memory. This suggests that the role of phonological short-term memory in text transcription difficulties is not a straightforward one.
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Motor Skill Learning and Timing |
A theory of motor skill learning termed COBALT (control-based learning theory) is presented by Willingham (1998), which postulates that four discrete processes are involved in the exercise of motor skill: strategic environmental goal setting; perceptual-motor integration; sequencing; and dynamic planning (the spatial-temporal choreography of the actual movement). He postulates that to achieve these processes, the brain generates representations of both space and time. Any inadequacy in temporal-spatial representation will compromise motor-skill learning.This model would be consistent with the hypothesis that children who have good phonological short-term memory, but who nonetheless have difficulties with text transcription, may have problems with the final part of this process, the dynamic planning of the task in real space/time. Such a difficulty might be maturational or developmental.
Evidence that there is a maturational component to this component of motor learning is provided by a study by Ellis (1992), who examined tempo perception and performance of children in grades 3-5, and found that ability to discriminate between heard tempi improved with age, independently of musical training. His data also suggest that measures of temporal accuracy in performance improved with age, although overall temporal accuracy, as opposed to steadiness, did correlate with musical training. This suggests that accurate mental temporal representation is something that develops with maturation, as does the ability to translate that representation into real-time performance. Keller (1999) suggests that correspondence between the internal representation of temporal events, and the real-time translation of such an event may be achieved by a synchronisation process, or “attunement” involving “attentional oscillators”.
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Summary of evidence |
There is evidence to suggest that verbally gifted children who are fluent readers, but who have difficulties with text transcription, may suffer from problems in translating temporal representations in short-term memory into real time action. The evidence that tempo performance appears to improve with age (Ellis, 1992); that discrepancies between text generation and text transcription abilities are frequently found in young gifted children (Yates 1995); that both reading ability and text transcription abilities are related to phonological short-term memory (Swanson and Berninger, 1996; McBride-Chang and Manis, 1996); and that temporal representation and translation into real-time is an aspect of motor-control processing (Willingham, 1998, Keller, 1999), suggests that text transcription disabilities in young verbally gifted fluent readers, at least as assessed by relative criteria, may be a maturational problem that may resolve as neural timing develops. However, it may be that failure to develop an adequate translation mechanism between internal temporal representation and real-time performance is a result, in some cases, of an inadequate sensori-motor stage in gifted children (Berninger and Yates, 1992). Given the importance of text transcription to the achievement of the potential of verbally gifted children, and the possible emotional sequelae of frustration at failure to express thoughts in written form (Brody and Mills, 1997), it would seem appropriate uncover further evidence as to the relationship between motor timing and test transcription difficulties.