How does your child learn? Why you should know.

The work of Dr. Zenhausern provides an answer. Dr Zenhausern is a retired professor of NeoroPsychology and he looked at why some children had difficulty learning to read. What he discovered has implications for how we label children and how we help them learn.

He asked two groups of children, one made up of average readers and one of children who had problems recognizing how the letters made sounds, to do two simple reading tests.

For the first test the children had to decide whether words on a list meant the same, opposite or were unrelated. Dr Zenhausern found that there was no difference between the two groups.

Then he asked them to decide whether the words rhymed or not. The children with phonological difficulties performed much worse than the other children even though the first test had shown that they understood the meaning of the words.

So, if these children were expected to decode the words they were trying to read they would be at a great disadvantage – even though they understood what the words meant!

As reading is all about meaning Dr Z wondered why teachers ask children with learning difficulties to decode words even when they understand what they mean.

This is an example of children learning in different ways. As Dr Z states ‘a phonetic approach worked for me and for many others, but it does not work for everyone. If phonetic decoding does not work for some children, use something that will’.

You need to know how your child learns so that you can help them learn in the most effective and efficient manner and not feel that, just because they learn in a different way, they are unable to learn at all.

I have worked with many children who are ‘different learners’. That does not make them learning disabled, just vulnerable to being seen as such. If you, the parent, can discover how your child learns you will be well on the way to understanding why he or she has occasional learning hurdles and what you can do to prevent them happening.