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Australia’s Decline in Literacy and Numeracy
I’m sure you have seen the headlines recently about the NAPLAN 2024 results. Australia is sliding on the literacy and numeracy scale. One in three students is below the literacy and numeracy baselines. In numbers that means that 400,000 Australian children who sat the tests for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 aren’t hitting the mark, requiring tutoring or are ‘working towards expectations.’
Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to start high school functionally illiterate.
There is a lot of talk about intergenerational disadvantage (their parents dropped out – so do the children). What if the parents were dyslexic – and so are the children in many cases?
The One-Size Fits All Approach to Learning Is Not Working
This is not just an issue of low socio-economic groups being disadvantaged, it is also an issue of a failure to teach children the way they learn best. The one-size fits all teaching has not worked.
What is interesting here is the reaction at the government level, the board of education, the ministry of education and different schools:
We need to get back to basics, the three ‘Rs’, as they like to call it.
We Need To Be Asking Different Questions to Give Greater Insights into NAPLAN Results 2024
My questions are different:
- “What about the students who cannot focus long enough to take in the information offered by schools?”
- “What about the visual learners who are finding the phonics approach very difficult – and see their spelling fall back further every year?”
- “Who teaches them HOW to learn, instead of WHAT to learn?” – The school system is geared to one way of learning. The school system is geared to auditory learners.
The Gap Between Educational Strategies and Learning Needs
When a parent shares the school’s teaching curriculum with me, I’m so inspired:
‘This term, our students will engage in two conceptual literacy units, each being five weeks long. These units feature explicit teaching of foundational literacy skills and deepens conceptual understanding through studying quality texts. All English units have an integrated focus on: reading comprehension & fluency, spelling, communication, handwriting and responding to literature and creating written texts. A differentiated spelling program will run based on the Soundwaves program.’
Impressive, right? However, the students I see daily at my dyslexia centre, the Sydney Dyslexia Hub, are not able to absorb any of the riveting topics, inspirational new approaches and innovative teaching styles.
Dyslexia, Visual Learning, and the Importance of Teaching Styles
You may believe that about 10 % of students are dyslexic and therefore cannot take advantage of this opportunity. There have always been more than 20 % of students who are visual learners (mostly dyslexic) and would benefit from a visual teaching style. Half of those don’t fall behind, their average marks are not worrying educators, but their full potential is not reached and most teachers don’t realise how much effort has gone into the ‘average’ output they observe.
If or when they get a dyslexia assessment, it is often linked to a common and fairly ‘new’ label: ADHD Type 1 – the former ADD.
Dyslexia – in my clinic – is assessed if a student is bright and not thriving and diagnosed (not that I like that term) if that student is a visual learner or somewhere on the scale between a visual and a tactile learner. They may be able to read well but lack fluency and full comprehension and the reading does not translate into spelling or writing.
While the increasing emphasis on a phonics-based approach at most schools – incorporated as MiniLit, MultiLit, MacLit or InitiaLit – has improved the reading levels of students, it has not translated into comprehension, spelling and writing.
Attention Span: A Critical Factor in Learning Success
One of the biggest issues I can see is the length of a student’s attention span. Focusing for just a few seconds or minutes at a time, they zoom in and out, depending on their interest in a subject. This puts a lot of pressure on a teacher to become an entertainer, adding unpredictability and fun to a subject that doesn’t always lend itself to it.
The schools’ answer is very often to suggest a child to go on Ritalin or a similar dexamphetamine to help them concentrate and pay attention for longer. It has become so commonplace that I have met parents who complain that they need to treasure the meds as the rapid use has made them scarce and they cannot always get a new prescription in time.
As I cannot work with a child or adult who is on these types of medication – our approach does the same and the effect will not be supportive of a desired outcome – it often depends on the agreement of a parent to stop or at least pause the use of their Vyvanse or a similar amphetamine to offer help to a student.
A Tailored Approach to Learning: Focus, Spelling, and Mastery
Our Sydney Dyslexia program focuses on different aspects:
- FOCUS – empowering a student or an adult to take charge of their mind and learn to focus at will – or daydream if required to get creative. Often it is a matter of not knowing how to bring a daydreaming mind back into focus. This gets practised and experienced until it’s a mastered skill.
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SPELLING and LEARNING DIFFERENTLY – We need to find out HOW a student learns best. If they are visual, then spelling gets done in the visual way…they learn how to enhance their visualising, remember spelling words for more than a few hours or days, and use ancient methods like mnemonics to imprint visual cues. That way of learning is also used for reading comprehension, as they need to create movies in their head from the content they just read. To do that they also need to:
- MASTER SIGHT WORDS – That means the earliest words they learn are often non-picture words – and they are everywhere. They make up most texts and they need to have a picture for a smart, bright dyslexic learner, who often cannot picture the meaning of words like ‘the’.
Empowering Students Through Tailored Dyslexia Programs
After an initial dyslexia assessment, the dyslexia program through Sydney Dyslexia will be tailored to the particular learning style of a student (or an adult), and the roadmap will focus on the goal, the motivation, and the ‘gap’ that needs to be filled by learning differently. It’s very empowering for any student and their parents to witness the transformation in only one week of a tailored program, delivered one-on-one.
Book a Dyslexia Assessment Today
If you feel that this approach may benefit you or your child, we’d love to see you for a personalised dyslexia assessment and make sure that the outcome is successful before offering a program to you.