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New Visions School NeuroTechnology Replication Project 2000 - 2001
Michael Joyce
Introduction
This hallmark study is the largest, most convincing study showing the
effectiveness of the DAVID Paradise driving a multiple system to
treat children with attentional disorders. The data generated in
the NeuroTechnology (NT) replication project are the result of the
efforts of seven Minnesota public schools (five elementary, one middle
and one K-12). The NeuroTechnology sites, referred to as Designated
Learning Sites (DLS), provided one to several school personnel to participate
in a three-day NT training at New Visions School (NVS)/Minnesota Learning
Resource Center (MLRC). This training (by Michael Joyce and Dave Siever)
provided the skills used to initiate brain training on the children in
their home districts. All of the hardware, software and related supplies
were provided for each site through a charter school dissemination
grant. Scheduled on-site mentoring was offered along with email and
telephone correspondence as needed. The following report describes
the results of their efforts.
Four of the elementary schools are located in rural Minnesota (Cold
Spring, Perham, Naytahwaush, Bemidji) and another is located in the west
Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins. The middle school is located in a north
Minneapolis suburb, Fridley. The K-12 school is in the small northern
Minnesota farming community of Greenbush. The Bemidji site was represented
by several elementary schools that were serviced by a Bemidji State University
psychology professor.
All sites, at this time, continue to successfully operate their programs.
Through the successful implementation and demonstration of these sites,
there are presently nine public elementary schools and one parochial
school in Minnesota, along with three schools in Wisconsin and a K-12
school in South Dakota, who have started NeuroTech programs without grant
assistance. These visionary schools have found that developmental neurological
functions are a necessity for all successful learners and that NT tools
can address essential developmental foundations of learning.
The Education Challenge
Traditionally, educators have viewed conditions such as Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),
and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as primarily medical conditions
and therefore outside the realm of education. Typically, children
with such conditions are referred to the medical world to identify
an appropriate medication to ameliorate the problem behavior. Therefore,
one of the critical factors for the success of this project is training
for educators so they understand the neuro-physiological basis for
such problem behaviors and the effectiveness of NT, in this case,
Audio Visual Entrainment (AVE) in re-educating the brain.
ADD/ADHD spans a broad diagnostic category, which is being applied to
more and more disorders and therefore evaluation and treatment has traditionally
been left to the medical community. ADHD is recognized as one of the
most complex psychiatric and neurologically-based disorders of childhood
with significant representation in adolescents and adults. ADHD rarely
occurs in isolation and is often combined with other conditions including
depression, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, obsessive
compulsive disorder, learning disabilities, anxiety disorders, and other
significant psychological, psychiatric, and neurological problems (Barkley,
1981; Ross & Ross, 1982; Rutter, 1983, Whalen, 1983).
ADHD is also one of the fastest growing conditions leading to children
receiving special education services in the public school setting. Children
with ADHD are often disruptive in the classroom, require frequent teacher
input, do not generally keep up with their peers in academic pursuits,
and often require additional services due to their significant difficulty
with all aspects of learning. Additionally many children are misdiagnosed
and actually have conditions of depression and anxiety. Medicating such
children with stimulant medications in these cases is contraindicated
and can even make their conditions significantly worse. More recently,
schools have become involved to a much greater degree, and now provide
screening tests to identify students with attentional disorders.
This scenario suggests that a training program that results in more
or less permanent resolution of ADHD symptoms be preferred over the traditional
medication management approach. NeuroTechnology (NT) is such an approach.
NT has been studied extensively in clinical and research settings for
the past twenty years. This approach, however, has not been utilized
on a large scale in the school setting - until now. This project substantiates
previous projects in schools in Minneapolis and Perham, MN and in Yonkers,
NY. These demonstration projects illustrate that the public school setting
is an ideal environment for conducting this type of training. This is
particularly true for low-income inner city and rural families who do
not have access to such training.
This project demonstrated the viability of utilizing this type of training/education
process in the public elementary school setting. Because this intervention
is a training process and not a clinical intervention, it is more appropriately
applied in the educational setting rather than in the clinical setting.
It is also clear that this intervention will not be available to the
vast majority of children who need it due to the medical profession's
reliance on medication management, rather then educational approaches,
for such problems. Additionally, the evidence that medication compliance
is significantly lower in low income families suggests that applying
this training method in inner city and rural schools in low income areas
would be a more effective method of addressing such impediments to learning.
Further, low-income students cannot afford such training from a physician
or psychologist and so do not have access to such an alternative approach
for the remedy of their disability, even if it is available in their
area.
This project provided the opportunity to demonstrate that effective
alternatives are available that offer, in many cases, an essentially
permanent resolution of student learning and behavioral challenges. This
project employed AVE to address the inattention, impulsiveness and behavioral
challenges in school-age children, thus reducing the need for medication
management of these children and reducing the educational resources that
are devoted to responding to their disabilities.
Participants
Students selected had a history of learning and reading challenges,
impulsiveness, and a propensity to be distracted and to distract
others. The students were selected by an ongoing, dynamic evaluation
process based upon referrals from classroom teachers, parents, special
education staff, and/or other concerned people in the student's life.
Parents were notified about their child's possible inclusion in the
project and they were invited to information sessions conducted by
project staff. Parents and teachers completed a behavior rating scale,
while the students completed a standardized reading inventory. The majority
of the 204 students participating in the NT project were of elementary
age.
Apparatus
The AVE device used was the DAVID Paradise XL (manufactured by
Comptronic Devices Limited, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). The
eyeglasses for the DAVID Paradise XL are field independent,
in that they are able to independently stimulate the individual
left and right visual fields of each eye thus producing a different
frequency in each hemisphere of the brain. In this project,
independent field stimulation was chosen.
At two sites the DAVID Paradise XL was attached to a multi-user amplifier,
which enabled up to ten students to receive treatment simultaneously.
Each student had his/her own station, which consisted of a set of headphones
and an eyeset. The students could control both the audio volume and the
light intensity. The students preferred brighter intensities, between
approximately 400 and 600 lux (full spectrum) measured approximately
0.3 inches from the eyeset screen (approximating their average eye distance
from the screen).
Procedures
Students participated in two or three AVE sessions (20-30 minute) per
week. Occasionally there were compelling reasons to increase the
frequency of sessions, so some students with severe impairments may
have had daily sessions. The training is part of the student's regular
curriculum, scheduled around other activities. Training is accomplished
using protocols established by the foremost clinicians and researchers
in the field, modified to reflect New Visions' experience working
within the school environment. Protocols were occasionally updated
to reflect the continuing growth of knowledge in this field.
Results
Data was gathered for a total of 204 students from seven different
school districts that participated in the NeuroTechnology Program
statewide. The average student completed nearly 30 twenty-minute
sessions over a period of three months, and gained eight months
in grade-equivalent oral reading scores. Pre- and post-intervention
data was obtained using direct assessment and behavior rating
scales completed by both parents and teachers. Oral reading
proficiency was assessed with the Slosson-R reading test (Figure
1). Behavioral and personality ratings were obtained via the
BDS, both the home and school versions (Figure 1).
Figure 1
This was an excerpt is from
the Appendices of "The
Rediscovery of Audio-Visual Entrainment Technology" by Dave
Siever, C.E.T. copyright 1997
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