She was a good student at Delta High School in Delaware County. She was an excellent speller, had a great vocabulary and wasn’t struggling with poor grades. But something wasn’t quite right with Lauren Dybwad, now 19, and a freshman at the University of Indianapolis. “I didn’t like to read,” Lauren recalled. “I didn’t like being called on in classes.” And the hours Lauren spent doing homework were piling up, sometimes until 2 am.
The problem? Lauren wasn’t visualizing the words and concepts on the pages of textbooks. “It never dawned on us that she had a reading problem,” explained her father, Steve Dybwad.
A chance conversation led the family to LearningRx, a brain training center that helps adults and children improve how they process, recall and retain information. “Brain training is a simple but powerful way to enhance a student’s core ability to learn faster, easier and better,” said Lynne McCauley, executive director of LearningRx. “Our brains are like muscles. They function better when all of our ‘intelligence muscles’ – memory, auditory and visual processing, attention and speed – are equal in strength and working together well.”
The Dybwads drove Lauren to LearningRx’s Geist office for one-to-one training three hours a week over 12 weeks. Another three hours of home instruction each week helped reinforce training strategies. Steve conceded that he was skeptical at first. “But what Lynne was explaining to us made sense. We decided to give it a try.”
Lauren’s transformation started with visualization exercises. She was instructed to create an imaginary white board in her mind and to “place” items on it that she encountered while reading. The purpose was to develop her visualization skills to help strengthen her ability to “see” what she was reading, associate it with auditory information and then transfer it to long-term memory. Other tasks included visual pattern and number cards used to match similar shapes and remember and manipulate number grids as well as memory games like tic-tac-toe with a math twist.
Within weeks, Lauren’s reading comprehension improved significantly, and she was participating in classes. Indeed, the training was so successful, she was valedictorian of her high school graduating class and received a full college scholarship. “Don’t feel like you can’t change. There’s always help for you,” Lauren advised. “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”
Mom and dad believe the investment of time (driving from Muncie) and money was more than worthwhile. “The most valuable thing we ever did was bring Lauren to LearningRx. There’s no question about it,” Steve said.
Lynne McCauley noted that there are enormous long-term benefits for students like Lauren. “We are able to improve the strength, accuracy and efficiency of a student’s thinking ability by fine-tuning how the brain assimilates, processes, combines, stores and retrieves information and outputs that information as knowledge or learning. It’s their most important ‘computer’ while in college,” she smiled. “Whether you or someone you know struggles with learning, or you’re looking to be faster, smarter and more efficient in a competitive world, brain training is a solid investment for anyone.”
