Nurah
Nurah
- Name: Nurah
- Age: 13
Dyslexia
Nurah is a creative teenager with dyslexia who is home-schooled . She is passionate about soccer and enjoys reading Harry Potter books, coming up with characters and stories of her own, and making her own hair dye.
She joined COGx because she wanted to listen and follow directions better, remember more, and act faster, especially when playing soccer.
To target processing speed, Nurah was constantly pushed out of her comfort zone as we pushed to increase her speed. Her desire to make no errors often held her back from moving as quickly she could. To address this, exercises were often drilled while intentionally disregarding mistakes, and her speed continuously improved as she was tasked with more challenging prompts and time constraints.
Regarding Nurah’s progress with memory strategies, she is quite a different learner now. At first, she obediently mimicked the desired techniques within an exercise, yet exhibited skepticism and surprise that the methods were helping her to retain material. Targeting her metacognition was a huge part of finding success in her learning process. Poor self-monitoring conflicted with her confidence and therefore, her ability to work independently. After she began to master techniques within sessions, she steadily improved her ability to accurately assess, manage, and problem solve with her own work.
Not only has Nurah’s cognitive stamina, concentration, and attention improved to meet that demands of challenging and/or time consuming tasks, she now addresses fatigue and alterations in attention more appropriately. She can offer examples of what to do in future learning instances if attention is interrupted, such as requesting a specific step of instructions, instead of feeling lost and needed redirection.
She can now apply memory strategies and techniques autonomously to her work, and articulate what she is doing. She can successfully define, differentiate, and layer techniques in order to learn new information.
Nurah can offer examples of how to incorporate interleaving, elaboration, and spacing into homework and studying assignments. She has displayed confident answers of what to apply for vocab, dates, lists of people, and reading assignments. If faced with material that requires a mix of techniques to strengthen the encoding process, she is significantly more comfortable at breaking the material down into chunks.