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Teaching to a child's strengths versus improving areas of weakness has long been a key concept in remedial planning for many practitioners. Strengths and weaknesses have often been related to sensory modality capabilities resulting in the notion of auditory learners, visual learners, and learners needing haptic and kinesthetic feedback. This excellent review of research which assesses the validity of the modality strength concept finds strikingly little support; thus, practical wisdom is not supported by research data. Because the modality preference/strength concept has intuitive appeal and is apparently useful to many practitioners, the possibility certainly exists that the research is inadequately designed or insufficiently sensitive to validate this central principle. Comments regarding the methods of the studies and the conclusions of this review are invited from practitioners and researchers. — G.M.S. The question of whether to teach to a child's strength or to his weakness has long been debated in educational literature. This paper reviews 15 studies investigating the interaction between perceptual modality preference and method of teaching reading. Three questions were addressed in reviewing these studies: (1 ) Is there a significant interaction between modality preference and method of teaching reading? (2) Does modality preference affect t reading achievement regardless of method of teaching reading? (3) Does the method of teaching reading affect reading achievement regardless of modality preference ? With respect to the first question, this review found no evidence supporting an interaction between modality preference and the method of teaching reading. With respect to the other two questions, evidence is less clear-cut. These findings are discussed with implications for further research. inherent in many concepts fostered within the field of learning disabilities -individualization of instruction, intra-individual differences, diagnosticprescriptive teaching -is the notion of

A growing body of literature clearly shows typical LD children have trouble directing their attention to the central features of an externally-provided task. Further, LD children perceive the consequences surrounding their behavior to be more externally-controlled than does the average learner. This inactive, externally-controlled learning style is well documented. Further research needs now to isolate the subgroups which may exist within the broader characterization and examine the effectiveness of remedial techniques with the various subgroups. - G.M.S.

Twenty-one experimental studies of attention deficits in children with learning disabilities were reviewed. Included in the review were studies of distractibility, hyperactivity, impulsivity, vigilance, and intersensory integration. From the accumulated evidence, the following conclusions were drawn: (1) Children with learning disabilities exhibit more distractibility than controls on tasks involving embedded contexts (figure-ground perception tasks) and on tests of incidental vs. central learning. They are not differentially distracted by other types of distractors such as flashing lights and extraneous color cues. (2) Hyperactivity of children with learning disabilities may be situational-specific, with higher levels of activity being exhibited in the structured situation. (3) Children with learning disabilities are more impulsive, i.e. less reflective, than controls. (4) Children with learning disabilities are deficient in their ability to maintain attention over prolonged periods of time. Studies of attention within a standardized testing framework were also discussed

This study was conducted to determine if the phonemic awareness skills of college-aged dyslexic students (n=10) differ from those of their nondyslexic peers (n=10). Both groups were tested on reading of real and nonsense words and a phoneme reversal task. Although the dyslexic subjects had received considerable language remediation and were all succeeding at their college studies at a level that did not significantly differ from the nondyslexic subjects, they performed significantly poorer on two measures of phonemic awareness: reading of nonsense words and increased error rate and response time on reversal of common three phoneme words. These results were interpreted to suggest that although the dyslexic subjects had improved their reading skills there remained a fundamental deficit in their ability to process phonological information quickly and accurately.