Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders: Growth cycles of mind and brain: analyzing developmental pathways of learning disorders

Overview: Development is not a linear process, but a dynamic interaction between the individual's mind, brain, and social and physical environments. Considering learning disorders from this dynamic, situated perspective is especially important, because many of children's abilities to compensate for perceptual or cognitive difficulties are constructed from the properties of this interaction. For this reason, dynamic models hold great promise in helping us to understand development in learning disorders. They contribute powerful tools for assessing diverse developmental pathways in all their real-life complexity, without separating the individual's mind and brain from his or her environment. Furthermore, dynamic models enable us to conceptualize and measure development in terms of recurrent growth cycles, bringing assessment of children's developing minds and brains together under one framework. Research on electrical activity in the cortex demonstrates such growth cycles in brain growth, which seem to parallel the cognitive cycles, as discussed by Robert Thatcher in an essay for this chapter. The dynamic framework for analyzing pathways of growth provides an important conceptual and methodological advance in our ability to make connections between neurological and cognitive growth, which will have major educational implications for learning-disabled children. The Editors In recent years developmental science has been transformed – from a relatively static framework that assumes stable skills and slow, linear change to a dynamic framework that focuses on change and variation in development and activity (Fischer & Bidell, 1998; Fischer, Yan, & Stewart, 2003; Thelen & Smith, 1994; van Geert, 1998).