VESID

New York parents of students receiving special education services may be familiar with VESID, which stands for Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities. VESID has long served a dual function in New York. It is an adult service agency, which deals with individuals over the age of 18 with a documented disability, and coordinates programs and activities to help them find productive work and lead independent lives. As part of this adult mandate, which is the same as agencies in every state established under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (the same law that provides "504 Plans" for students of all ages), VESID counselors may start working with students while they are still in high school, to plan for post high school transition to college or the workplace.

VESID also has an additional function; it is the arm of the New York State Education Department that operates the special education system in New York State. As the VESID website notes, it is presently responsible for the following functions:

• To oversee the implementation of federal and State laws and policy for students with disabilities;

• To provide general supervision and monitoring of all public and private schools serving New York State preschool and school-age students with disabilities;

• To establish a broad network of technical assistance centers and providers to work directly with parents and school districts to provide current information and high quality professional development and technical assistance to improve results for students with disabilities;

• To ensure a system of due process, including special education mediation and impartial hearings; and

• To meet with stakeholders through the Commissioner's Advisory Panel for Special Education Services.

There has been discontent in some circles with how VESID performs this part of its role, which has also been affected by budget and related staffing issues that have impacted its ability to do its job. We have learned that there is now a proposal before the New York State Regents (who supervise all educational matters in the State) that "would include combining all P-12 education issues, including special education, under a new Regents P-12 Committee"which would replace VESID.

Adoption of this proposal can have a real impact in the way the special education services are overseen in New York. We will continue to follow this matter to let parents know of any changes to the special education system

Forty Winks -- The Impact of Naps on Learning

A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego and reported by the media relations department at the University of California at Berkley gives a big boost to nappers everywhere. The study was conducted by Matthew Walker, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who, together with his colleagues, looked at the impact of a 90 minute nap on 39 healthy young adults.

The study subjects, who were divided into two groups, were given a learning task that was intended to subject the hippocampus (the part of the brain that stores facts) to a large amount of information. The two groups performed similarly on the learning task. Mid-afternoon of that same day, one group took a nap for an hour and a half and the other group stayed awake. Finally, in early evening, both groups were given more information to learn.

The results were clear. The group that had been given the chance to nap not only did better than the non-napping group, but also improved their own capacity to learn. "It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you are not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder," Walker said in the U.C. Berkley report.


Next up for Walker and his team is an examination of whether the diminished amount of sleep that older individuals get compared to younger people is a factor in the difficulty some older individuals have in learning new information.

So, next time you feel badly for sacking out in the afternoon -- or next time you criticize someone for taking a nap while you are hard at work -- take a step back and think about a nap as a chance to clear your brain to allow it to better process new information. Maybe countries with afternoon siestas have a point!

Photo credit: mikecpeck via Flickr

How Learning Interventions Can Change the Brain

For much of the last decade, scientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging have demonstrated that areas of the brain associated with reading can show increased activity in individuals who have been exposed to effective reading interventions. Shaywitz and others have explained their findings in such accessible books as Overcoming Dyslexia, which includes examples of brain images of individuals before and after reading interventions.


A fascinating study by Thomas Keller and Marcel Adam Just of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging that appears in the December 10, 2009 issue of the journal Neuron takes this kind of neuroimaging a step further, using the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) process to look not just at discrete areas of the brain but at the crucial connections between such areas. This "white area" of the brain contains the pathways that make higher order thinking possible. As the authors note, "Although the basic computing power of the brain surely lies in individual neurons, it is only in their collective action, made possible by white matter connectivity, that enables the multi-centered large-scale brain networks that characterize thought."

The study involved three groups of eight to ten year olds. 35 poor readers received reading interventions. 12 poor readers did not receive any reading instruction beyond regular classroom lessons. And 25 good readers also received no specific interventions. The study demonstrated clear increases in connective matter only in the students receiving the interventions. The study authors raised the question of whether the increase in brain connections or the improvement in phonological decoding ability came first -- but suggest that it is also possible that such changes develop interactively, "as one might expect in a dynamic system such as the brain".

This is one more in a series of exciting scientific windows into the complexities of learning and the brain. By keeping abreast of the latest imaging techniques and what they can tell us about learning, we can better focus remediations and strategies to help all kinds of learners expand their skills.

Why a Blog?

Welcome to our new blog.

We have always been a largely volunteer organization. Our Director, Susan Yellin, also works outside the nonprofit world and, as part of her other jobs as a writer and attorney, has been blogging about issues related to learning, transition from high school, and special education for the last eight months. We believe that many of these blogs would be of interest to the readers of our website. So, we have decided to provide the best of these blogs to our Center for Learning Differences readers, along with other original material which will only be posted here.

We hope that you find all of our posts to be informative, thought provoking, and helpful as you work with your child, student, or patient who learns differently. Let us know what you think!