Not a lot to report of late but I found a few interesting resources for everyone.
Language Immersion - Not all good
Earlier today I was visiting a regional board for a top secret meeting (not really top secret but it makes it seem more exciting that way) and came across a pamphlet promoting the French immersion schools available within the board. I have long regretted my lack of multilingualism and have wondered if I would send any future offspring of mine to a French immersion program when that time comes. Literature has been mixed on whether such a program is a good idea. It is hard to really discover the truth with all of this as the vast majority of measures used on these kids was designed either to measure Anglophone's or Francophone's specifically and was not normed in an immersion environment (the FIAT is an exception but is so old who knows if it's accurate any more). Add one more study to the confusion, it now appears that learning a new language can actually lead to decreased fluency with your mother tongue. It appears that this is not due to forgetting, but rather is due to an active inhibition of ones primary language that cause distraction while integrating a new language. This may in fact be an adaptive strategy to aid in the more efficient acquisition of a second language. If this is accurate it would be interesting to see if this effect occurs with those second language learners with executive impairments. You can read the research review by clicking here
Save Some Paper - Hire a Chiropractor
Who would of thought we would of been wasting so much time teaching emerging academic schools and focusing on remediation and intervention designs. An unusual study out of Europe has performed a meta-analysis of previous studies, finding that chiropractic services show significant cognitive benefits for children with learning disabilities and Dyslexia. So drop those remediation guides, read the article by clicking here, and pull on an arm!
Intelligence Blogging
I wanted to post some blogs that are worth reading on topics similar to mine.
IQ's Corner by Dr. Kevin McGrew (a WJ-III author) is a very useful and daily updated blog. Of special interest is a handful of articles on a range of School Psych topics which might be worth snagging before the publisher ask for them to be pulled (hopefully they have permission to post them as Dr. McGrew is a guru of tracking down great articles).
Dr. McGrew also has a very interesting cognitive psych blog that is a bit more experimentally oriented but is certainly worth a read for those of you who are thinking at that level it can be found by clicking here.
Developing Intelligence is another upper level cognitive psych blog that I read daily.
EIDE Neurolearning is a fairly new blog to my reading list. Its focus is on remediation design at a neuro level.
As with any source I encourage everyone to be skeptical with blogs (mine included) as they are typically opinion pieces and as an opinionated person I can tell you we are the type who blog! Fortunately the aforementioned sites routinely present their sources which should always be read before solidifying your own opinions.
