T.R.A.I.N^TM

T.R.A.I.N™ - ing Crystallized Intelligence

A child's crystallised intelligence, stems from learning and Parents would see it reflected in tests of knowledge administered in schools, use of vocabulary by the child and in a wide spectrum of acquired skills that the child will display.

Crystallised Intelligence is all about experience accumulation and education.

In fact when the Dyslexia Association of India_TM assesses children, we attempt to understand the various aspects that amalgamate to contribute to this factor.

Primarily, global comprehension, lexical knowledge, reading comprehension, phonetic coding, speed of reading, grammatical sensitivity, listening, ability to acquire a third language, communication, oral production, style of writing and grade level competence -versus -overall measured general cognitive ability are carefully screened, to reach the conscious understanding of the cognitive potential of the child and his /her level of crystallised intelligence.

It may come as a surprise to many parents, but from a neurobiological perspective, synaptic density tends to decrease as human beings grow older.

This decrease is most evident in the prefrontal cortex area of the brain, which in turn controls the processing speed and executive abilities of any child.

This is crucial to understand, as it is our conscious and conscientious investment in a separate entity - the fluid complement of intelligence, which ensures that crystallised intelligence to continue to develop for a child well into the age band of the Forties and Fifties.

How does this happen? The training programme of the Dyslexia Association of India_TM activates the neutral substrates with cognitive activities, which cause transfer effects to the domain of crystallised intelligence. This then is visible (in effect the Dyslexia Association of India™ brain programme creates crystallised intelligence) in the superior performance in all measures of cognitive assessments relevant to improving educational outcomes (post neuroplasticity training phase) for those children who are struggling.

A significant number of children demonstrate a general pattern of cognitive functioning in school, where despite having a higher degree of innate intelligence, they perform poorly in the academic sphere. For these children the crystallised intelligence rather than coordinating positively with age actually shows a stagnant trajectory where we observe a plateau of performance while we should have been seeing an upward movement.

Once we have identified the underlying cause of this plateau at the Dyslexia Association of India_TM using very advanced psychometric tests, the T.R .A.I.N_TMprogram uses a combination of brainwaves and neurofeedback combined with cognitive strategies to decrease ‘neural noise’ and ‘chatter’. The target is to reach a steady state of polarization of the neural substrates so that processing speed and working memory (amongst other issues) increase exponentially and a state of ‘maintained ability’ is reached.

If we were to represent the issue graphically the first figure demonstrates the crystallised IQ of the child who was not able to tap into his potential despite a reasonably above average fluid complement of intelligence and the second figure represents the child who has undergone the neuro plasticity remedial using the T.R. A. I. N_TM programme.

The second graph represents the increased capacity of long-term accumulation of the skills and knowledge that a child gains and is able to retain once the program has run its duration.



The child's knowledge and skills get organised much like a ‘file organiser’ into units for use in future learning. As a child progresses in class he/she can draw on these assemblies of knowledge or performance processes, which are activated and applied anew in classroom instructional situations.

T.R.A.I.N™ ensures that children who were previously approaching academic tasks inductively, i.e. reasoning backwards learn how to employ deductive or forward reasoning – which draws on complex assemblies of knowledge.

Children, continue to develop the complex, domain specific knowledge over time having learnt ‘how to try’ combined with the ‘willingness’ to try.

T.R.A.I.N_TM, which combines development of expertise, and neutral activation, allows the children to surmount any inherent capacity limits and speed of basic reactions and processing speed.

T.R.A.I.N_TM helps children make the powerful connection between long-term memory and the basic intelligence they possess so that the higher order cognitive functions are processed by the coordinated activation of widely distributed brain areas, and the increased cognitive ability comes about due to functional facilitation rather than the structural peculiarity of the neural networks for general intelligence which are usually found in the posterior parietal regions including the bilateral SPL and the right IPS.

Over the period of time, we have observed that a significant number of parents normally ask us that what is the need for the emphasis on increasing the crystallised intelligence ability of their child. We would like to share; crystallised intelligence involves the ability to apply previously learned information to new material. If a student has a deficit in this area he or she is likely to have reduced vocabulary and a limited background knowledge, the long-term effect of which will be reduced academic grades and poor performance in school and subsequently in institutions of higher learning.

Crystallised abilities, especially ones language development, vocabulary knowledge, and the ability to listen are important for reading. This ability is related to reading comprehension in particular. Low crystallised abilities may hamper a child's ability to comprehend written text due to lack of vocabulary knowledge, basic concepts, and general life experiences that are needed to understand the text.

Crystallised abilities, including language development, vocabulary knowledge and listening abilities are important to mathematical achievement at all ages. These abilities become increasingly more important with age, and low crystallised abilities may hamper a child's ability to comprehend the word problems due to lack of vocabulary knowledge. They may hamper the child's ability to learn basic math’s processes such as long division due to impairment in his ability to listen and follow sequential directions.

These abilities are important to writing achievement for the child after the age of seven also. These abilities become increasingly more important with age as students are required to draw upon previously learned vocabulary and experiences to generate compositions. Crystallised abilities, especially the child’s language development, vocabulary knowledge, and the ability to listen are important for both listening comprehension and oral expression. Low crystallised abilities may hamper the child's ability to comprehend oral communication due to lack of vocabulary knowledge, basic concepts, and general life experiences that are needed to understand the information being presented. T.R.A.I.N_TM works to better the Long-Term-Memory Retrieval of a child and Longterm retrieval involves the ability to store and retrieve symbol names over would a period of time, holding the information in memory while attending to new information. Children with a deficit in this area may have difficulty such as learning the names of the letters of the alphabet or memorisation of mathematical facts.

Long-term retrieval abilities are particularly important for reading. For example, elementary school children who have difficulty naming objects or categories of objects rapidly may have difficulty in reading. Associative memory abilities also play a role in reading achievement. Long-term retrieval abilities are important for mathematical calculation skills. For example children with deficits and longterm retrieval may have difficulty with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and/or division fax when encountered within a mathematical problem. Most of these are addressed after the T.R.A.I.N_TM programme has run its course.

The links to achievement in written expression can be seen from the fact that long-term retrieval abilities and naming facility in particular have demonstrated relations with written expression, primarily the fluency aspect of writing. Short-term memory is the ability to apprehend and hold information in the immediate awareness and then use it with them a few seconds. Working memory, a subcomponent of short-term memory includes the ability to attend to and immediately recall temporally ordered elements in corrected order after a single presentation, as well as, the ability to store temporarily and perform a set of cognitive operations on information that requires divided attention. Any child with a low score on the crystallised complement of the intelligence will run into a roadblock in his/her ability to retain information in the short-term memory sufficiently long enough - and subsequently transfer it into the long term memory substrates. So it becomes even more important, for us to focus on providing a wide platform of information and knowledge so that the child's mind is challenged to imbibe newer and more varied information, which in turn will increase the ability of the child.

The T.R.A.I.N_TM program provides a direct link to achievement in reading and mathematics via the modality of increasing the crystallised intelligence ability of the child. Short-term memory is important to reading achievement, reading comprehension, involving long reading passages, which may be affected by skills specifically related to working memory. If we ignore the level of crystallised intelligence ability for a child and make no attempt to improve it, basic word reading may be impacted, by deficits in the short-term memory because it may interfere with the acquiring of letter and word identification skills. Short-term memory is important to mathematical computation skills. For example deficits in short-term memory may impact one's ability to remember a sequence of orally presented steps required to solve long mathematical problems.

The Neuroplasticity programme of the Dyslexia Association of India_TM targets these shortcomings and helps children perform better by improving their short-term memory ability, which then cascades to a larger pool of grade level competency

To know more about the T.R.A.I.N_TM programme, please e mail The Dyslexia Association of India_TM at (info@dyslexiaindia.org.in) or you can even call us on 88260 – 22886 to speak to us freely and set up an appointment to meet us.

The T.R.A.I.N_TM Neuroplasticity Programme is a copyright programme of the Dyslexia Association of India_TM and protected by the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act. Please do not use information gained from this programme to misrepresent any instructional course or programme being delivered by a third party vendor. The T.R.A.I.N_TM programme is available only at the DAI_TM Intervention Centre and it has not been franchised out to any vendor.