I'm curious if any of you have any experience with or opinions on a company called Learning Rx. I have a gravely unsatisfying pt job that does at least pay well, but I have been looking at alternatives. Our local Learning Rx was advertising for "cognitive skills trainers," so I figured that I'd see what they were doing. I am not interested in being involved in hothousing kids to do well on IQ tests a la the NYC preschool prep. I went to their hiring night last night where they gave us info on their program and put us through a bunch of quick "cognitive skills tests." I apparently passed b/c they want me to come back for an interview.

So, what they claim is that they can fix ADHD, dyslexia, working memory and processing speed deficits, etc. and raise your IQ -- not just your IQ scores, but your actual intelligence. It sounds interesting, but I am reserving judgement on the veracity of these claims until I do a bit more research. Their examples included kids like my dds who are very high on most parts of an IQ test (upper 90s+) and low in one or two areas like processing speed or short term auditory memory. They said that they could get those skills up to the 90s as well. Again, they said that it wasn't just that the child would now test that high on IQ, but that he would actually process faster, get his homework done in half the time, etc. They also seem to get a lot of kids who are really struggling in school. On that end of things, they gave an example of a 5th grader who couldn't read at all and, in 2-3 months, they had him reading almost at grade level with no reading instruction, just brain training to build the skills needed to read. They said that, in a few more months, he would be above grade level in reading if he continued with their program.

Do you believe that it is possible to increase intelligence and/or rewire the brain such that someone is not just learning to work around a LD, but actually no longer has a LD?

Here's an article from Nature that may be relevant.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/4641111a.html

I would have a healthy dose of skepticism.
It sounds like a good piece of marketing, and maybe some legitimate tutoring. I'm sure that tutoring a non-reading 5th grader can help reading skills. But to claim to fix ADHD and dyslexia? Sounds like the brain-training programs' claims, too.

I'd be skeptical too, since there's so much in the way of possible snake oil, or unproven wacky therapies, out there these days.

But I do have kiddos with low processing speed, among other things, and I'd love it if that could be fixed. However, my sense is that it's something that possibly could be improved temporarily but not necessarily permanently (a la the research on listening therapy, etc. that showed gains going away over time).

Do tell more though - every so often, I think, there must be a way around this processing speed thing - but for my kids it's really linked to motor issues. Their motor output is slow (coding subtest), really slow - for one of them, the disparity between WM and the coding subtest scores is in the area of 90 percentiles (four standard deviations??).

I wish I'd stop trying to "cure" my fidgety kiddo; query: why is it that he has such slow motor output when he needs to move constantly in order to think? LOL, but seriously there must be something to that...like a switch needs to be re-routed in his brain.

Me too !

I went for the interview and they want me back again tomorrow and possibly to come for three full days of unpaid training after which, if I am selected, I'd work for fairly low pay: $12.50/hr.

I'm leaning toward no at this point. I did pose my concerns to a special ed teacher locally who tells me that she's never seen functional gains with kids who have done brain training exercises, although she hadn't had kids go through this specific program. The people from the company did give me some unpublished studies as well showing improvement on WJ-III scores (both cognitive abilities test as achievement test) in their kids vs. a control group. That raised another concern. It appears that I would be expected to administer WJ-III Cog tests to kids and I really am not qualified to do so. I do have Bachelor's and Masters degrees and have taken one undergrad course in psychological testing & assessment, but I do not have a Masters in Psychology or Education, which is what Riverside Publishing requires to be a test administrator. The people who run this center also do not have those degrees, so they could not legitimately be supervising my administration of these tests, either.

That leaves me wondering about how valid these gains are if the person administering the test doesn't have enough training and could be getting invalid results consequently.

The part of me that wants to research and dig into claims that raise my radar is still curious, but I do feel like I'd be wasting their time and mine to go back for the next interview.

Do you think it could be one of those times when the saying - "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is" may apply?

Some "fidgety" kids have retained infantile reflexes that make it hard for them to sit still. The same pattern of neurological development that results in the retained reflexes also results in motor issues that look like slow processing speed on paper and pencil tests.

There are OT interventions that can be helpful in encouraging these retained reflexes to integrate, but they are not always the whole answer, to be sure.

Exactly. That's one of several reasons why the unpublished study supposedly with a control group, mentioned above, is (I think, is MegMeg out there or someone else who knows?) unpublishable. The control group just continued with their ordinary school activities. So that work can't say whether having the kids learn, say, knitting for that same amount of time might have produced the same effect.

What's even more interesting is that the company employee Alicia Luckey who did a PhD on the programme didn't AFAICS publish anything in a peer-reviewed forum about her work. That's a bit of a red flag; you'd expect a PhD by someone who goes on to work in the same area to result in a journal publication, IME, and it would obviously be good for the company to have peer-reviewed research to point at, so why didn't she put the effort into publication? This extract from the PhD thesis abstract gives a clue: "Limitations of the current study included lack of a control group and the use of parent reported diagnoses to differentiate diagnosis groups. Additionally, examiner effects including the halo or expectancy effect may have impacted scores at post-test." - i.e., unpublishable.

OTOH, I would actually be prepared to believe that strong effects from this kind of training done over that kind of timescale could exist. I wouldn't absolutely rule out getting involved, but I'd watch my ethics in terms of what I was expected to say or endorse by association very, very carefully, because my fear would be that it would be impossible to be involved without participating in false claims to parents about what had been proved about the programme.

I passed on pursuing work there. I just wasn't sure that I believed in what they were claiming enough to sell it to others.

Sounds smart, Cricket. Some of the posts on this thread look like advertising to me...

DeeDee

I am admittedly not a trail blazer and tend to be pretty conventional. That said, I'm skeptical of Learning Rx, Cogmed and a host of alternative treatments.

While I would love to "fix" the underlying causes of my child's LD's, it seems that many of these techniques do not have a track record of lasting and generalized improvement. And, they are resource expensive - time and money.

I have a son who is high functioning autistic. He has benefited greatly by his training at learning Rx. I have researched cognitive development and Learning Rx seems to implement the principles needed for cog improvement the most effectiviely. Three elements need to be present to increase those brain pathways....intensity, duration, and frequency. In my research learning Rx does these things the best. I have loved my experience there and my son loves it also and feels great after 18 weeks.

Rosemom,

Could you be more specific about how your son "feels great" after his 18 weeks doing this program? What specific changes have you seen? How has this translated into real-world functional gains?

And what precisely do you mean by "high-fuctioning autistic?" Some people use that to describe Asperger's or PDD-NOS, and others use it to mean classic autism with relatively mild impairments.