Idea units in notes and summaries for read texts by keyboard and pencil in middle childhood students with specific learning disabilities: Cognitive and brain findings

Seven children with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia (2 girls, 5 boys, M=11 years) completed fMRI connectivity scans before and after twelve weekly computerized lessons in strategies for reading source material, taking notes, and writing summaries by touch typing or groovy pencils. During brain scanning they completed two reading comprehension tasks-one involving single sentences and one involving multiple sentences. From before to after intervention, fMRI connectivity magnitude changed significantly during sentence level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→right Broca's) and during text level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→cingulate). Proportions of ideas units in children's writing compared to idea units in source texts did not differ across combinations of reading-writing tasks and modes. Yet, for handwriting/notes, correlations insignificant before the lessons became significant after the strategy instruction between proportion of idea units and brain connectivity at all levels of language in reading comprehension (word-, sentence-, and text) during scanning; but for handwriting/summaries, touch typing/notes, and touch typing/summaries changes in those correlations from insignificant to significant after strategy instruction occurred only at text level reading comprehension during scanning. Thus, handwriting during note-taking may benefit all levels of language during reading comprehension, whereas all other combinations of modes and writing tasks in this exploratory study appear to benefit only the text level of reading comprehension. Neurological and educational significance of the interdisciplinary research findings for integrating reading and writing and future research directions are discussed.