Edublox Explained in a Nutshell

Summary

Edublox is an educational method that integrates cognitive training, reading or maths tutoring, and solid learning principles. Edublox assists students in becoming life-long learners and empowers them to realise their highest educational goals. While not a quick fix, Edublox programmes can permanently alleviate the symptoms of learning difficulties and disabilities like dyslexia.

Edublox explained

Learning is like building a house. The first step is to lay a foundation. Without a solid foundation, cracks will soon appear in the walls, and with no foundation, the walls will collapse.

In the same way, one needs to lay a proper foundation before it becomes possible for a child to benefit from a course in reading, writing, and arithmetic. If this foundation is shaky, learning “cracks” will soon appear.

Simply put, Edublox is a system of cognitive exercises aimed at building a solid foundation for learning.

Foundational skills should be distinct from processes, strategies, or techniques. The difference between foundational skills and processes, strategies, or techniques can be explained using the game of basketball. To be a basketball player, a person must first master the foundational skills, e.g., passing, dribbling, defence, and shooting. Only after that can he be taught strategies or techniques.

Edublox develops and automates the foundational skills of reading, spelling, writing, mathematics, and the necessary skills to learn subject matter. A list of the most important foundational skills addressed by Edublox includes:

• Attention and concentration
• Accurate perception
• Visual discrimination of colour, foreground-background, form, size, and position-in-space
• Visual analysis and synthesis of position in space
• Auditory discrimination of foreground-background, and position-in-time and space
• Auditory analysis and synthesis of position-in-time and space
• Decoding and integration of information
• Visual closure
• Imagination
• Visual, auditory, sequential, iconic, short-term, long-term, and working memory
• Reasoning and logical thinking.
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Edublox also offers application in the form of reading, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension exercises in our language-based classes and the understanding of terminology, mental arithmetic, word sums, reading time, etc., in our maths-based classes.

Edublox is multisensory

Multisensory instruction is a way of teaching that engages more than one sense at a time.

There is no doubt that a person’s weaker senses can be improved. A blind person, being deprived of sight, usually develops all the other senses to a remarkable degree. To learn to read Braille, they must develop their tactile sense remarkably. This fact is important because it shows, without the help of complicated tests, that every sense can be developed and improved.

By learning to use all his senses, the learner’s ear will eventually come to the aid of his eye and his hand to his ear, thereby opening three channels to his mind instead of only one.

Based on solid learning principles

The first learning principle is that human learning does not take place on a single level but is a stratified process. This characteristic is accepted worldwide as a didactic principle. The way the school system throughout the world is organised is an acknowledgement of this. One cannot send a child to university first. They must start in the first class and then progress year after year to higher levels of education. Unless they have mastered a sufficient amount of the learning material presented to them to form a firm enough base on which to build the following year’s knowledge, they will not make progress in the next class.

Another simple and practical example is the fact that one has to learn to count before it becomes possible to learn to add and subtract. Suppose one tried to teach a child, who had not yet learned to count, to add and subtract. This would be quite impossible, and no amount of effort would ever succeed in teaching the child to add and subtract. This shows that counting is a skill that must be mastered before it becomes possible to learn to do calculations.

In the same way, there are also skills and knowledge that a child must have acquired before it becomes possible for them to benefit from a course in reading.

Based on 30+ years of research and practical experience

Over the last 30+ years, Edublox has helped more than 150,000 people in approximately 40 countries to read, learn and achieve through home kits and learning clinics internationally.

It started as a school readiness program with only a few cognitive exercises in 1979. Then, purely as an experiment, in 1980, the program was used for a learning-disabled child who overcame his learning difficulties. Over many years, in a quest to perfect the programme and later programmes, our team has extensively researched learning, learning principles, brain development, and neuroplasticity.

School results define our success. Annually, since 2010, we have been requesting Edublox clients, long-term and new, to complete an online survey to help us measure our performance. In our latest survey, the key question, “Did your child’s academic performance improve at school?” received a 94% positive rating.

Our other 780+ documented successes include research from Singapore in 2014 with 27 Grade 6 learners and a matching control group. The results were analysed by the CEA in the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria and showed a statistically significant improvement in focused attention over a period of five days (18 hours of training). Over and above, the effect size is large.

The experimental group in Dr. Jaidan Mays from the University of Johannesburg’s study showed an improvement of 1.3 years in visual memory and 1.5 years in visual sequential memory after receiving intensive Edublox training over five days (22.5 hours of training).

Dr. Lee DeLorge in Ohio tested 67 students aged 5 to 18 with ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and non-specific learning disabilities. The processing speed of 94% of the learners improved significantly:
* 35 ADHD students: 52.45% combined increase (37.24% pre-test avg/89.69% post-test avg);
* 13 dyslexic students: 46.76% combined increase (41.31% pre-test avg/88.07% post-test avg);
* 2 students with dyscalculia: 57.38% combined increase (39.76% pre-test avg/97.14% post-test avg);
* The remaining students were non-specific LD: 64.14% combined increase (30.40% pre-test avg/94.54% post-test avg).

A study at the University of Pretoria by Dr. Wynand de Wet found an increase in non-verbal IQ scores of 11.625 in deaf children after 27.5 hours of Edublox instruction, which was confirmed by our own trials of hearing children: an improvement of 5.6 in verbal IQ and 12.5 in non-verbal IQ after 40 hours of instruction.

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