PSYCHOLOGY AT SCHOOLwhose self-control he’d tested in the 1960s (see p.113), he found that those
who were more skilled at deferring gratification were more academically
successful and had fewer behavioural problems a decade later.
Whereas IQ has always been considered largely immutable, self-
discipline shares with working memory the distinct possibility that it is
amenable to training. For that reason, these new findings are optimistic,
suggesting that children can be taught the skills they need to help them
excel in academic work.
Learning difficulties
One of the most common learning difficulties that educational psychol-
ogists deal with is dyslexia, from the Greek meaning “difficulty with
words”. It’s a controversial topic because in some countries a diagnosis
of dyslexia can unlock resources and extra teaching provision that would
otherwise be unavailable or punitively expensive.
The conventional view is that dyslexia manifests as a reading ability
lower than you’d expect based on a child’s general intelligence. This
reading deficit has been traced to a problem handling the building blocks
of sound from which words are formed, known as phonemes. Whereas
a confident reader can use letter-to-sound conversion rules to read a
nonsense word like “challyhoo”, a child with dyslexia is likely to struggle.
Critics of the concept of dyslexia point out that poor readers with low
general intelligence also struggle with phonemes. They also benefit from
the same kind of phonological training as do children diagnosed with
dyslexia. By this account, some children, smart and not so smart, have
reading difficulties and we should help them all.
Some psychologists have focused on other problems that often
seem to go hand in hand with dyslexia, including postural instability
and difficulty telling left from right. For example, the Dore treatment
approach (named after paint-tycoon Wynford Dore who funded the
programme) is based on the idea that the root cause of dyslexia lies in
irregular function of the cerebellum – the cauliflower-like structure at
the back of the brain that’s known to be involved in learning and move-
ment. Clients on the Dore programme undertake physical exercises
designed to improve their co-ordination and cerebellar functioning,
with the effect, it is claimed, of aiding reading ability. But just because
dyslexia sometimes coincides with movement problems doesn’t mean
those problems cause dyslexia – as several critics in mainstream
psychology have pointed out.