It is my understanding that all programs can benefit kids, since apparently ANY individualized attention will help kids with LD's. I just wonder how real the gains are, in the long term, and whether we need expensive programs to get those gains.
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 That's one of several reasons why the unpublished study supposedly with a control group, mentioned above, is (I think, is MegMeg out there or someone else who knows?)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.
