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In one, chil­dren with ADHD were ran­domly assigned to high inten­sity (HI) or low inten­sity (LI) WM train­ing. The HI treat­ment involved per­form­ing com­put­er­ized WM tasks, e.g., remem­ber­ing the sequence in which lights appeared in dif­fer­ent por­tions of a grid, recall­ing a sequence of num­bers in reverse order, where the dif­fi­culty level was reg­u­larly adjusted to match the child’s per­for­mance by increas­ing or decreas­ing the items to be recalled.

Each group trained 30–40 min­utes per day, 5 days per week, for 5 weeks with train­ing super­vised by par­ents

A sub­se­quent study also used ran­dom assign­ment to HI vs. LI train­ing, and observed the impact on children’s behav­ior in a con­trolled class­room set­ting.

The authors con­clude that their find­ings cast “…doubt on the claims that CWMT is an effec­tive treat­ment in young chil­dren with ADHD.”

par­ent reports indi­cated sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tions in ADHD symp­toms, par­tic­u­larly inat­ten­tive symp­toms; these reduc­tions remained evi­dent at 3 months. How­ever, no ben­e­fits in ADHD symp­toms were evi­dent in reports pro­vided by children’s teach­ers.

A sig­nif­i­cant lim­i­ta­tion in the evidence-based for using CWMT to treat youth with ADHD is the absence of teacher reported ben­e­fits.

some have sug­gested that CWMT should be regarded as no more than a ‘pos­si­bly effi­ca­cious’ treat­ment for ADHD and not con­sid­ered a ‘first-line’ treat­ment like med­ica­tion and behav­ior therapy.

Two recently pub­lished stud­ies

Results indi­cated sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tions in off-task class­room behav­ior among chil­dren with ADHD who received HI train­ing. This par­tially addresses con­cerns about fail­ure to find teacher reported ben­e­fits in other stud­ies.

Results from these 2 randomized-controlled tri­als do not sup­port CWMT as a first-line treat­ment for ADHD.

What can we con­clude from this work? Despite promis­ing ini­tial reports sug­gest­ing that CWMT is a poten­tially effec­tive treat­ment for ADHD, these stud­ies sig­nif­i­cantly under­cut this con­clu­sion. This does not mean that there is no util­ity to CWMT, how­ever, par­tic­u­larly for indi­vid­u­als with demon­strated work­ing mem­ory deficits. If one’s treat­ment goal is to enhance work­ing mem­ory, CWMT may have real value. If the goal is to bring ADHD symp­toms under con­trol, how­ever, these find­ings indi­cate that for most chil­dren with ADHD, CWMT would not cur­rently be con­sid­ered a rea­son­able sub­sti­tute for med­ica­tion and/or behav­ior therapy.

the CEO that can manage and control our emotions.

undergoing maturation throughout the school years.

research reveals other causes of the high stress state in school and suggests interventions to reduce the stress blocking response in the amygdala.

ew information cannot pass through the amygdala (part of the limbic system) to enter the frontal lobe if the amygdala is in the state of high metabolism or overactivity provoked by anxiety. It is important for teachers to know that when stress cuts off flow to and from the PFC, behavior is involuntary.

it is possible to decrease the stressors of frustration from work perceived as too difficult or boredom from repeated instruction after mastery is achieved

the emotion sensitive limbic system is a switching-station that determines which part of the brain will receive input and determine response output.

most successful construction of working (short-term) memory takes place when there has been activation of the brain’s related prior knowledge before new information is taught.

help students increase working memory efficiency

with opportunities to make predictions, receive timely feedback, and reflect on those experiences.

Memory is Sustained by Use

needs to be activated multiple times and ideally in response to a variety of prompts for neuroplasticity to increase its durability

Retention is further promoted when new memories are connected to other stored memories based on commonalities, such as similarities/differences, especially when students use graphic organizers and derive their own connections.

Multisensory instruction, practice, and review promote memory storage in multiple regions of the cortex,

requires opportunities for students to transfer learning beyond the contexts in which it is learned and practiced

The U.S. Department of Labor also is funding a four-year, $5 million project in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest nations, to reduce child labor in cotton farming and gold mining.

"We are not calling upon companies to boycott gold that has been mined by children," Kippenberg said, "but to remediate the situation if they find child labor in their supply chain - by engaging the relevant government, their suppliers, and demanding progress to get these children out of the mines and into school."

The U.S. Labor Department and the ILO consider mining one of the worst forms of child labor because of the risks of injury and death and the long-term health consequences from constant exposure to dust, toxic chemicals, and heavy manual labor.

Each new student is fully assessed at Arrowsmith School so that we may identify his or her areas of strength and weakness and design a program of cognitive exercises specifically for that student’s particular learning profile.

The Arrowsmith Program is founded on neuroscience research and over 30 years of experience demonstrating that it is possible for students to strengthen the weak cognitive capacities underlying their learning dysfunctions through a program of specific cognitive exercises. 

Our program has proven effective for students having difficulty with reading, writing and mathematics, comprehension, logical reasoning, problem solving, visual and auditory memory, non-verbal learning, attention, processing speed and dyslexia.

The Arrowsmith Program is founded on two lines of research, one of which established that different areas of the brain working together are responsible for complex mental activities, such as reading or writing, and that a weakness in one area can affect a number of different learning processes. The other line of research investigated the principle of neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to physically change in response to stimulus and activity, to develop new neuronal/synaptic interconnections and thereby develop and adapt new functions and roles believed to be the physical mechanism of learning.

The Arrowsmith Program deals with the root causes of the learning disability rather than managing its symptoms.

You may read more about the development of the Arrowsmith methodology in the book “The Woman Who Changed Her Brain,” by Barbara Arrowsmith Y

A number of television programs and interviews have been devoted to the work of Arrowsmith Program. A compilation of these programs describing the methodology of the program is available on our Videos link.

the goal of our research is to better understand the role that early experiences in children's lives have on development of brain structure and function.

The interview with Wang, a neuroscientist, along with one of his coauthors, Dr. Sandra Aamodt, celebrates the release of their new book, Welcome to Your Child's Brain, which synthesizes research on how the brain develops from infancy to adolescence and provides scores of tips for parents. The interview and a report on NPR's web site, "How to Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong," are chock full of great advice that dovetails with best practices for baby/toddler reading:

• Don't use force.• Realize that children reach cognitive milestones at different times.• Expect babies' brains to do very complicated things. • Take advantage of the baby's special language capacities.• Capitalize on babies' attraction to language. • Use active and social exposure to words.• Encourage bilingual learning in babyhood.• Teach self-control.• Take advantage of your child's natural sense of fun.

"The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot" and "Respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn't forming the words correctly or you don't understand it.

add reading aloud and talking about the story to increase the number and quality of word data going into the baby/toddler brain in the first three years of life.

most of all, add book sharing and word games, because the attention and fun with words and books are a wonderful vehicle for physical contact and bonding.

About 1 in 5 children struggle with phonemic awareness and other disabling issues, so dismissing reading as something that seems as simple as telling "the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on" and saying that "it's something that older children can do without any effort at all," is oversimplification.

Many babies learn to read some words before they can speak them.

Children have to think in words before they can read them. But they don't necessarily have to speak them before they can read.

Teaching your baby or toddler to read joyfully and informally is easier than teaching a child to read formally at age 6.

Teach your baby/toddler to read and bring loving physical contact, language, thinking, feelings, bonding, creativity and expression into one simple act. There may be no better way to help your child's brain grow up strong than to teach your child to read joyfully.

In other words, people cannot adequately learn and defend themselves at the same time. When parents, especially high-risk parents who are often under social and legal scrutiny, take the risk of placing their caregiving approach under a magnifying glass their attachment needs (for protection and comfort) are often activated.

what is needed is a system for differentially identifying each child’s attachment pattern and his or her parent’s caregiving pattern, followed by a specific treatment protocol assigned to that dyadic pattern. Such a protocol helps eliminate the potential problems of a “one size fits all” approach to intervention.

this differential assessment-intervention protocol would allow more standardization in the training of service providers and implementation of their services, as well as the replication of the success we have come to know in our current work.

The Circle of Security™ is a user-friendly map that we developed to teach attachment theory to parents.

When children feel safe, their exploratory system or innate curiosity is activated and they need support (either verbally or non-verbally) for exploration; As they are exploring, sometimes they need their parents to watch over them, sometimes they need help, and sometimes they need their parents to enjoy with them; When they have explored long enough, (or if they get tired or anxious, or find themselves in an unsafe situation) they need their parents to welcome them back. When they return, they need their parents to comfort, protect, delight in, and/or organize their feelings. We focus on the last piece because for many of the parents it is a new idea that children need help organizing their internal experience as well as the external environment. When the attachment system is terminated, children are ready to start the circle again.

Children who have even one adult spending time with them like that can form those connections, regardless of family wealth and education,

preschool should be about practicing all the ways that the brain experiences language — hearing it, speaking it, seeing it and writing it

Preschool also should provide “lots of opportunities to play, explore, listen to stories, look at the pictures and written words, and talk about what they hear,” Berninger said.