BrainWare Safari: Cognitive Skills Development and Learning to Read

The cognitive skills that support decoding, such as attention, visual discrimination, visual sequential processing, immediate memory and working memory, must be automatic for successful reading. Many struggling readers are deficient in these skills. But despite the necessity of these skills, they are not generally taught in schools. In fact, the primary challenge in improving the teaching of reading is to close the gap between what the research tells us is needed for struggling readers and what is actually provided in our schools. The fact that cognitive skills are not explicitly taught in schools does not mean that they can not be taught. For over half a century, techniques to develop basic cognitive skills have been known and used in various clinical therapies but haven’t been practical to deliver in the classroom. Today, digital game-based learning is making the delivery of cognitive training programs viable in a classroom setting.