How has Developmental Psychology Contributed to Improving Children's Lives?
How has developmental Psychology contributed to improving children's lives? This essay will address Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) with particular focus on Dyslexia. Dyslexia is one of the more widely recognised of Spld's and has been defined as a difficulty with written language skills and phonological processing even in the presence of adequate learning opportunities and IQ. This essay aims to highlight the influence that developmental psychology has had on our understanding of Dyslexia and how this has translated practically in our treatment of it. As well as the course materials this essay will draw on research papers by Norwich et al. (2007), Tafti et al (2009), Pammer (2010) Riddick (2010) and Zakopoulou (2011) these papers will add discourse on more recently researched areas of Dyslexia such as early intervention, The inclusion education movement and the relationship between labelling and stigmatisation. Also looking at questioning how we view Dyslexia altogether, suggesting rather than a defcit Dyslexia is merely a different style of learning. Much research has been done in the area of Dyslexia and understanding has been greatly improved in many different ways. One such way has been through technological advances helping discover the biological basis for some of the deficits experienced. Also empirical quasi experimental tests have highlighted the practical ramifications that these deficits have on a dyslexics everyday life. Brosnan et al (2002) tested participants matched for age, educational level and IQ in three separate studies. He found dyslexics performed significantly lower in digit span tests and showed inhibition deficits particularly with distractors (GEFT) Using fMRI scans it was physiologicalb differences were discovered. Dyslexics showed a cerebral symmetry suggesting a failure to shift from word level to letter level processing. Non dyslexics would show an increased left hemispheric activation when processing language, so