Category: Education

Specific Learning Disabilities, or SLDs, can make it challenging for children to keep up with the general curriculum and acquisition goals for language learning. SLDs include brain injuries, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. Children may also have ADHD, visual processing impairments, or memory issues that make it difficult to decode languages, whether they are monolingual or multilingual.

However, these children can learn as many languages as they’d like with the appropriate accommodations, teaching techniques, and support.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) defines an SLD as a “disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations.”

A Personalized Approach

While education programs and governing bodies want to see all students succeed under the general curriculum, the truth is that every student benefits from personalized instruction. Students with or without learning disabilities have individual needs and learning preferences.

Guardians can support language acquisition by finding a tutor or online learning program. Students can receive personalized instruction to learn Chinese, English, Spanish, and other languages through flexible virtual classes. With a class size of one student, these teachers can curate their curriculum and activities around your child’s needs. Students can focus on their progress without comparing themselves to peers or trying to meet statewide standards.

Teachers in traditional classrooms can’t have one-on-one sessions with every student, but they can implement some of the best practices listed below to help their students with learning disabilities thrive. Guardians can also familiarize themselves with these tools to practice the target language at home.

Build Community

Learning an unfamiliar language can be intimidating for any student. Inevitably, every learner will make mistakes when practicing the target language. Feelings of embarrassment or inadequacy may accompany these mistakes. These feelings might be compounded in students with learning disabilities who may experience discomfort around peers and teachers due to their learning needs.

You can have hundreds of teaching tricks up your sleeve, but the first step in helping your students thrive is making the classroom supportive. The more comfortable your students feel, the more confident they will be in themselves when learning and using the target language. Use getting-to-know-you activities to build community. During your lessons, highlight that all people possess strengths and weaknesses and that each person brings something unique and valuable to the table.

Make Physical Accommodations

The classroom and home study space can either increase or minimize distractions. For example, seating arrangements can make or break a focused learning environment; students can easily distract one another. You can rearrange the seating to keep students that antagonize or distract each other in different groups. You can also provide an intake sheet to learn your students’ preferences. Some will benefit from sitting closer to their instructor for more consistent support and guidance.

There are plenty of physical aids to use in the classroom or an at-home study space. Students might like wobble chairs, pencil grips, and graph paper for a better kinesthetic and visual experience. You can also supply them with adaptive technology, material organizers, and privacy boards to limit external stimuli while encouraging focus.

Make Lessons Meaningful

Some SLA curricula and teaching methods promote rote learning, which only serves short-term memorization and does not consider learning disabilities. You can make lessons meaningful by making connections between the target language and culture and your students’ experiences. Students will be intrinsically motivated to learn and connect the new information to existing neural pathways, promoting long-term retention.

Fast Blast: Teaching Techniques

Listed below are tried and true methods for supporting second language acquisition for your student with learning disabilities:

• Allow more time on assignments.
• Provide oral and visual directions.
• Allow students to record lessons and take pictures of materials.
• Encourage self-correction, summarization, and reflection.
• Implement routines to establish consistency in the classroom and at home.
• Teach organizational and memorization strategies, such as color-coding and mnemonic devices.
• Break down large projects into manageable checkpoints, giving feedback at each stage.
• Encourage students to ask you questions before and after class. Many will prefer to speak to you one-on-one rather than voice their questions to a group.

Conclusion

Students with learning disabilities are more than capable of becoming multilingual. Educators and guardians must understand the common challenges these children face and implement personalized tools and teaching methods to foster their progress.

The concept of the Dunning-Kruger Effect can be easily explained, especially if we use a graph to show how it works.  It’s not rocket science.  Not that I know much about rocket science, but I do know enough to admit that I am far from being an expert.  See what I just did there?  I showed that I am not experiencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect on that subject.

You see, even though I possess very little expertise about the subject of launching rockets into space, I have seen them launched in TV.  I’ve watched movies on the complicated math equations it takes to launch a rocket.  I am fully aware that to be involved the process I need to know light years more than I do.

Contents:

• What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
• Who are Dunning and Kruger?
• Dunning-Krueger Effect shown with a graph
• How to Avoid the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Not falling under the spell of the Dunning-Kruger Effect does not mean that I am smarter than anyone else. It’s possible for anyone to find themselves under the Dunning-Kruger Effect when thinking about other issues. The key to not falling victim to faulty thinking is acknowledging this simple fact:

‘the more you don’t know about something, the more likely it is that you will think you know a lot about it than you really do.

What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

In very simple terms, the Dunning-Kruger Effect happens when someone knows so little about a subject that they believe they are somewhat of an expert.  The more a person learns about anything at all, the more they realize how much they don’t know.  As they gain more knowledge through reading, listening to experts, and taking classes on the subject, they gradually cross a threshold where they are on their way to becoming a true expert and not just one who thinks they are.

Essentially, anyone can find themselves under the Dunning-Kruger effect when they have no expertise on an issue or subject.  Someone who is not musical has no business expressing their strong opinions on whether and popular singer or musician is talented or not.  Yet, you hear it all the time from opinionated people.  Again, this does not mean they a low IQ.  It simply means that on some subjects, their lack of expertise will make them sound foolish if they express their opinions on the subject. The same is true of politics and sports.

In addition to knowledge, the Dunning-Kruger Effect happens when people overestimate their abilities and are overconfident.

Incidentally, men tend to be 30% more confident about their abilities and women tend to downplay their abilities by 30%.  This leaves a large confidence gap between the sexes.  For children, things are more equal. However, as as girls and boys become teenagers the gap grows.

Who are Dunning and Kruger?

David Dunning and Justin Kruger are psychologists at Cornell University.  These two well educated men were intrigued by the story of a bank robber named McArthur Wheeler.  He believed that video surveillance cameras would not be able to record his face because he had covered it with lemon juice.  This is what initially peaked Dunning and Kruger’s interest in the idea of how a total lack of knowledge about something can blindly lead a person into thinking something that is totally incorrect.

The story is a bit crazy and this video better explains how the Dunning-Kruger effect came to be:

Dunning-Krueger Effect shown with a Graph

Let’s recap.

• The less someone knows about something, the more likely they are to think they know a lot about it.
• The more knowledge they gain on a subject, the more they realize that they are inadequate in their limited expertise.
• As knowledge grows, they cross a threshold to where they actually are closer at becoming an expert.
• Eventually he moment arrives, through education, experience, or both, that they have legitimate expertise.
• Being a true expert about something does not mean you won’t fall under the Dunning-Kruger effect in other areas.

A mentioned, these concept also apply to a lack of confidence and over estimating confidence in one’s abilities. However, self confidence is a positive thing that should not be confused with being overconfident.

This graph shows the progression of how one moves through this process. 

The confidence of a person who knows nothing is on the peak of ‘Mount Stupid’, while their competence is in the Valley of Despair.   As they become enlightened, whether though education or experience, they are closer to being an expert – even though they may never get close to it.

An example of a person gaining some insight on a subject through education may be as simple as them watching a NOVA program on space and getting their mind blown by the vastness of space.  Therefore, they would say to themselves.  “There is so much to know about space I realize how far I am away from being an expert on it”.

Sports is an example of a person who gains insight through experience.  If they never play the sport, they may naively think… “That looks easy enough”.  But when they actually play the sport and fail miserably against those are much better, they will correctly acknowledge their lack of competence.

How to Avoid the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Here are something things you can do to ensure you don’t succumb to the trap of making an expert opinion on something you know very little about, and possibly being ridiculed by your peers.

• Do some research from reliable sources on a subject before you give an opinion on it.
• Acknowledge that without education and experience, you are more than likely know very little to nothing about any topic.
• Remember, great expertise on one subject does not mean you won’t fall under the Dunning-Kruger Effect on another subject, especially if you’re not careful.
• Take Heed!  Nothing is ever as easy as it looks.  Try to understand something in a much broader capacity than you already do.
• In the case of activities, try to do an activity more fully before relying on what experience you already have.
• Utilize all the resources at your deposal to be life long self learner.

Plagiarism is unacceptable whether it happens in academic circles or on online websites. In academic circles, you may receive a zero grade or even face expulsion. If you plagiarize in web articles, search engines won’t rank your content, and it will become invisible. Here is more about plagiarism, why it’s unacceptable and how to prevent it.

What is Plagiarism? 

Plagiarism is when you present the work or ideas of another as your own without the consent of the original author or giving the author any acknowledgment. You may not even do this intentionally, but it is still unacceptable.

Why is Plagiarism Cheating?

Professors in academic institutions want to evaluate your original work and not the work of others. Plagiarism is stealing intellectual property. It is unethical because you benefit from someone else’s efforts. The uniqueness of your work is important as a student. The whole point of your assignments is to evaluate your progress. If you present the work of others as your own, it not only shows poor scholarship but defeats the object of learning.

How to Test for Plagiarism

If you want to know how to avoid plagiarism in books, articles and other academic writing, checking your work for plagiarism is essential. You may not even realize where you are guilty of plagiarism. The highly popular FixGerald tool for students and teachers is a plagiarism checker that will list any instances where you copy directly from an online source or don’t use quotation marks for a quote. A plagiarism fixer gives you an opportunity to reword content that’s too close to an original source and make it unique.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

When you’re a student and you have to write essays, book reports etc., you need some tips to help you to avoid plagiarism.

• If you have to read books and write book reports, you can’t just use the words of an author to make a point. You must place the words in quotation marks. You also need to include a footnote or an in-text citation to show the source. If you don’t do so, it looks as though the words are yours and not those of the author.

• You can’t use the ideas of others in your essays without proper citation. Your instructors will want to know what ideas you came up with yourself and which ones came from consulting different sources. You must acknowledge all the sources of ideas that aren’t your own.

• If you paraphrase, you need to do so carefully. Just swapping words around is not enough. It is important to present the ideas you found in a source accurately, but you need to describe them in your own language.

As you progress in your studies, you will understand how important it is to use many different sources. You may want to add to existing research you find in scientific literature, such as journal articles. You may argue that existing research is inadequate and discuss why. To do this, you need to be familiar with important research in your field. You will have to refer to many different sources. You will need to cite them correctly using a specific citation style.

Prevent Plagiarism in Web Articles

Bloggers and website owners also need to ensure that their articles are 100% original. Search engines rate original content highly. Any instances of plagiarism will result in lower rankings in search engines. If you have a website for a business, this means less organic traffic to it and fewer chances to convert consumers to customers.

Do Not Use AI Tools to Write for You 

There’s nothing wrong with running your essays or research papers through some tools like grammar and spelling checkers or the Hemingway App. This can help you to reduce errors and make your writing clearer. It’s when you use AI tools to write your work for you that it can be a problem. A teacher who knows your writing ability and style is likely to identify that you didn’t write the work but used AI to write it. Educational institutions also now using AI detection tools.  In addition, many AI tools paraphrase existing copy from multiple other websites and this is also a form of plagiarism (cheating), especially if you don’t cite your sources.

Conclusion 

Plagiarism is not acceptable in academic institutions, and the consequences can be severe. You need to avoid it in online articles and on websites, too, because search engines don’t like unoriginal content. Hopefully, the above ways of avoiding plagiarism will help you. You should always check for plagiarism, as you may have done it without realizing it. If you check and find problems, you can still fix them before you hand in a paper or publish an article.

Six sigma has enabled large corporations like Google, Amazon, and Wipro to grow significantly. Six sigma is no longer simply associated with manufacturing companies. Enrolling in a lean six sigma course can help in various industries like finance, healthcare, hospitality, etc.

Obtaining your lean six sigma certification will ensure you gain the essential skills to begin your six sigma career.  For those new to these terms, Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation and enhancing process control.  Lean Six Stigma includes a focus on driving out waste and promotes work standardization and flow.

Let’s check out the benefits of lean six sigma to understand why it’s important for accelerate your  career goals.

1.   Gain an advantage over other applicants

Employers get hundreds of applications for different positions, but they only select certified professionals. Since lean six sigma certification is globally recognized, you will gain an edge in the competition. The certification will prove to employers that you have the relevant skills and experience to improve business operations. Your application will stand out from inexperienced professionals and will make you closer to landing your dream job.

2.   High salary opportunities

Before taking up any position, you must negotiate the salary and other perks. A lean six sigma course will ensure you can stay on top of your bargaining game at the negotiation table. You will see a significant gap between your salary and non-certified professionals.

The salary potential will continue to increase as more businesses warm up to the lean six sigma methodology. Moreover, your salary will increase according to the different levels of the certification. For instance, an individual with six sigma black belt certification will have an average annual salary of $1,06,000 in the US.

3.   Obtain real-world experience

One of the major benefits of a six sigma course is that you learn how to apply the acquired skills. The course will allow you to work on a real-world improvement project with mentoring and support. Additionally, you will become an expert at managing lean projects and implementing process improvements across types of businesses.

4.   Help improve organizational efficiency

All companies following the lean six sigma methodology desire to improve their organizational efficiency. The methodology ensures that all employees are on the same page and are focused on identifying bottlenecks in the process as the process enables companies to produce more with minimal effort, efficiency, and profitability increase.

Team members collaborate better by following the six sigma principles, and employers notice higher productivity and morale. Customers begin receiving products faster with proper measurement of quality standards, which can lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Lean six sigma certified professionals are a major win for employees, customers, and the organization.

5.   Transform into a leader and influencer

Similar to all project management tools, leading a team and managing stakeholders is crucial for lean six sigma certified professionals to succeed. Besides the methods and tools, lean six sigma certification is also about managing change, improving project quality, and producing more efficient work.

A lean six sigma online bootcamp ensures that you can easily manage change and handle your team members. You can improve your leadership capability by better understanding team dynamics and change management.

Furthermore, the lean six sigma certification offers you better analytical skills to assess and handle change. You will be able to ensure that your team members have an improved sense of responsibility and ownership for their projects and work. Applying the lean tools and methodology will ensure you have a greater influence on your team members.

6.   Streamline systems and processes

Due to the growing complexities in businesses, improving processes and systems has become crucial. By making systems and processes more effective and efficient, the lean six sigma methodology can help businesses. The certification ensures you become familiar with all the tools and techniques required for effective change management.

The lean six sigma course will teach you to spot improvement opportunities, build execution plans, and track progress. You will also learn to maintain effective communication with stakeholders for guaranteed buy-ins from different levels of the organization.

7.   Solve complex problems

The lean six sigma methodology is based on continuous improvement to drive more customer value. The only way to ensure continuous improvement is by easily solving complex problems. The lean technique enables you to improve your thinking skills. The course is a blend of theory and real-world practice to solve problems with a structured learning approach.

8.   Reduce errors and mistakes

Once you get into leadership roles, you must constantly improve your team. The different techniques from a lean six sigma course make it easy for you to handle the errors and mistakes of your team. For instance, you can map out the steps of a process to determine where mistakes are highly likely. Identifying these areas will help prevent errors from taking place again.

9.   Enhance organizational culture

Managers trained in the lean six sigma online bootcamp can create a healthier, happier, and more productive work environment. The skills imparted during the course will ensure you develop a firm grasp of change and quality management. You will become more efficient at identifying and removing roadblocks that prevent the productivity and efficiency of teams.

You can create a work environment conducive to employees by applying lean six sigma principles. A culture of continuous improvement will ensure that managers can motivate employees to work toward fulfilling a shared goal. Organizations adopting the lean six sigma methodology ensure you can enhance employee productivity and satisfaction.

Final Words

A lean six sigma online bootcamp can help you build a robust career in quality management. The live classes delivered by leading experts from Simplilearn will ensure you gain in-depth knowledge of change management. You will also get to work on a capstone project to gain real-world experience.

Career Resources

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