Supplement Study BC Broekhin

The combination of auditory stimulation with specific remedial education is proved to be successful. Can students also benefit of Johansen-IAS without this specific remedial education? Unfortunately it was not possible to treat the dyslexic students only with J-IAS. Most of the dyslexics come to BC Broekhin especially for this specific remedial education. I decided to offer them a different support. The students were supported in their shortcomings in several subjects they have at school. This means to help them with problems in specific subjects like: how to use French grammar in exercises, how to learn English words, how to make a summary of a text, how to pronounce some words in German, etc.

This study started in November / December 2006 and ended in February / March 2008. 10 dyslexic students (others than those of group 1 of the first study) participated in this study. They were treated with auditory stimulation and general supporting.

Results:

The group improved significantly on the following items:

Technical Reading (decoding)

Spelling

Speed copying

Rapid Naming

Auditory Memory

Phonemic Analysis

Reading Comprehension (meso score)

Audiogram                

Laterality (D.L.T.) left and right

They improved on the following items, but not significantly:

Visual Memory

Reading Comprehension  (micro score and macro score)

Conclusions:

Technical reading / decoding: Without specific reading support dyslexics improve, especially on non-words and reading aloud! This is a confirmation of earlier findings of Dr. Johansen.

Spelling: Students improve as well on this item, but there is a difference between the groups. The original research-group shows a lot more improvement. We can conclude that auditory stimulation together with spelling-support shows more effects than without.

Writing/copying: Students improve significantly on this item only in the last study. There is no explanation for this, because in both studies they didn’t get any specific support for writing.

Phonemic analysis: Significant improvement in both studies. Johansen-IAS treatment increases sound processing.

Rapid Naming: On the following items the supplement-group improves more than the research-group: dice, pictures, words and picture-names. The supplement-group shows a lower score on colours and numbers. We find an equal score on colour-names and letters. In general (total average) can be said that there is no big difference in information processing between the two groups.

Memory: Very remarkable is the score on auditory and visual memory! This is just the other way round as in the first study. In the last study auditory memory improves a lot (+64,5%) compared to the first one (+10,1%). Visual memory: last study:(+3,1%) and first study (+30,1% ). I only can guess to the reason of this. The special focus on spelling / reading could be one reason for the slight improvement on visual memory. For the improvement of auditory stimulation in the last study I don’t have any explanation.

Reading comprehension: Here too some remarkable results were found.  On micro score (word-level) the original research-group (+9,8%) improves more than the supplement-group (+2,5%). This can be due to the special remedial education. However, how to explain the meso score (sentence-level): research-group (+8,2%), supplement-group (+35,8%) and the macro score (text-level): research-group (+25,0%) , supplement-group (+9,0%)?  It could be possible that the different treatment (offering some learning-strategies) influences both scores. Probably students get a more solid base for reading comprehension through this treatment than through the normal treatment dyslexics get at our school.

Audiogram and laterality: Of course there is an improvement in the audiogram. Every student who follows this treatment shows an improvement on his hearing curves. Remarkable is that on the laterality test students of the supplement-group improve relatively more than students of the original research-group. On the other hand they improve more on the right comparing to the original research-group. There is no influence on this difference because of the different treatment. Important is that students improve on laterality. This can have a positive effect on the information processing. Which, on the other hand, can help students to perform better in school.