The Power of Knowing that You Know Something

One of the lessons I learned in my first year of teaching - fortunately before the end of the year - was that it's not enough for students to learn; they have to see clearly that they are learning; and for this purpose, it is not enough to give them ways to apply the new knowledge & skills; you have to really spell out for them here is what you have learned.

This morning, I saw an interesting illustration of the power of feeling that you do know something, in Oliver Sacks' account of one of my favorite stories of scientific discovery.

Dmitri Mendeleev had been playing with arranging and rearranging cards representing the various known elements, trying to discern the underlying pattern; one night he fell asleep and dreamed the Periodic Table, more or less as we know it.

Here is Sacks' footnote to the story:

This, at least, is the accepted myth, and one that was later promulgated by Mendeleev himself, somewhat as Kekule was to describe his own discovery of the benzene ring years later, as the result of a dream of snakes biting their own tails. But if one looks at the actual table that Mendeleev sketched, one can see that it is full of transpositions, crossings-out, and calculations in the margins. It shows, in the most graphic way, the creative struggle for understanding which was going on in his mind. Mendeleev did not wake from his dream with all the answers in place but, more interestingly, perhaps, woke with a sense of revelation,  so that within hours he was able to solve many of the questions that had occupied him for years.

(Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten. New York: Random House, Inc, 2001. p. 198)

Irlen Syndrome: my investigation

Someone sent me an article about a girl who ordinarily found reading difficult and fatiguing; but when she tried laying transparent colored plastic over the page or screen, she was able to read normally.

Well, that sounded intriguing; so I started looking up more about Irlen Syndrome...
...and what I read made me suspicious.
If this is a real syndrome, why does it have its own diagnosticians? And what is behind the claim that a high percentage of the population (and the vast majority of the prison population) has a reading problem that I never heard of?

There are a lot of articles online, like this one, quoting parents and teachers who say they've seen colored overlays make a big difference.
And there are a lot of articles written from a scientific perspective, like this one or this one, claiming that Irlen Syndrome doesn't exist and the overlays don't work.

So, I asked around: Who has some insight into this?

The responses that I got from people I know paralleled what I found in the articles: I heard from parents and teachers, telling me about students who found the overlays effective ("when she started wearing glasses with yellow lenses, she suddenly went from a D to an A+ average"); or about some who maybe sort of did but they weren't sure; or about a rare light-sensitive student who actually did among many with reading disabilities who didn't; and I heard from an optometrist who said she thinks it's all a very expensive placebo effect; and my friend the nurse sent me another article....

...and then the reading specialist, who happens to know everything about everything, gave a brief answer that explains everything, including the discrepancy between the scientific findings and the anecdotes.

He wrote:

For reading difficulties: if it works, and in most cases it doesn't, it fixes a symptom, not the source of the problem. Multi sensory reading is the answer.
For light sensitivity or vision loss, it can help.

So, that's my answer.

Here are links about multi-sensory reading:
Multi-Sensory Kriah - he didn't send me this link; I am promoting him; and
Multisensory Structured Language Teaching Fact Sheet

As a side note, one thing all the Irlen pro and con studies seem to agree on is that children enjoy experimenting with reading through colored cellophane.
Well, a novel kriyah activity is also something...