NVLD and Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in Children: Clinical Guide to Assessment and Treatment

This unique volume explores issues related to working with children who have nonverbal learning disability (NVLD). It examines how a child’s psychology – thoughts, feelings, beliefs – affects his or her functioning and learning. In addition, the book addresses how a child’s experiences are processed through individual personality, psychology, culture, environment and economic circumstances, and family dynamics. Using these psychological organizing principles, the book describes how to work most effectively with young patients with NVLD. It offers a new model and definition for understanding NVLD, emphasizing its core deficit of visual-spatial processing.

In addition, this book addresses efforts to rename NVLD to developmental visual-spatial disorder (DVSD). It describes the 11 possible subtypes as including a primary deficit in visual-spatial processes and impairment in several additional functional domains, including executive functioning, social/emotional deficits, academic achievement, and motor coordination. The book highlights the need for psychologically minded treatment and provides specific intervention guidelines. It details how to conduct the intake process and create a treatment plan and team and offers practical suggestions for working with a patient’s family members. In addition, the book addresses the importance of working with a consistent psychological theory, such as control mastery theory (CMT). It describes the Brooklyn Learning Center Model for treating NVLD and offers guidelines for interventions to support patients academically. The book provides a comprehensive approach to the neuropsychological assessment of NVLD as well as examples of visual-spatial, sensory perception, executive functioning, academics, social/emotional deficits and motor coordination interventions, and all forms used to gather information from patients.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Definition of nonverbal learning disability (NVLD).
• Efforts toward inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and for renaming it to a developmental visual-spatial disorder (DVSD)
• Guide to general diagnostic testing and assessment.
• Developing a treatment plan and team for NVLD patients.
• NVLD therapy and tutoring priorities.

NVLD and Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in Children is an essential reference for clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in school and clinical child psychology, special education, speech-language therapy, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work as well as all interrelated disciplines.

Jessica Broitman, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice since 1980 and the president emeritus of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group (SFPRG). She was instrumental in the initiation of San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group’s Psychotherapy Training Center and Clinic and served as the Executive Director for 15 years. In 2017, she helped create the International Control Mastery Therapy Center (CMTCenter) and currently serves as the President of the CMTCenter. Dr. Broitman frequently lectures on Weiss’s Control Mastery Theory worldwide. She has become an expert on nonverbal learning disabilities (NVLD) and has co-authored two books on that topic for practitioners and parents. She is the co-author of Nonverbal Learning Disabilities in Children: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Practice (Springer, 2011) and the co-editor of Treating NVLD in Children (Springer, 2013) as well as numerous chapter and articles. For more than 15 years, she has worked with families who have children with learning disabilities. Dr. Broitman is involved in several research projects concerning the treatment and understanding of NVLD and has a special interest in helping professionals and families understand and treat this disorder. She is available for consultations and can be reached at: drjess@comcast.net. For more information on her work on NVLD, see: http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~basri/Broitman_Home/nvld/. For a half-hour video on NVLD featuring the authors, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymdZUuB-T4&feature=youtu.be  and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymdZUuB-T4&feature=youtu.be.

Miranda Melcher is a security researcher, teacher, analyst, consultant, and author. She is currently pursuing her doctorate on postconflict military reconstruction at King’s College London’s Defense Studies Department, with expected graduation in Spring 2021. Her research develops practical methods for rebuilding militaries and security institutions following civil wars, examining in detail the case studies of Mozambique and Angola. Ms. Melcher has also been a committed teacher and tutor for students ranging in age from 13 to 70, across a variety of subjects, focusing particularly on developing teaching practices to assist students with learning differences in the social sciences, including history, politics, and war studies. Ms. Melcher has taught at the secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels in the US, UK, and France, including for international, mature, and underprivileged students. She previously completed an MA in War Studies at King's College London as well as a BA in political science from Yale University. 

Amy Margolis, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the Director of the Environment, Brain, and Behavior Lab. She has a doctorate in Applied Educational Psychology-School Psychology from Teacher’s College and is trained as a clinical neuropsychologist with two decades of experience assessing and treating children with learning and attention disorders. In 2010, she completed a T32 fellowship in translational psychiatry at Columbia University and now conducts research as well as clinical practice. Dr. Margolis is an expert in human neuroimaging and focuses her learning disability research program on the brain basis of psychological factors that affect children with learning disorders, such as anxiety and executive function problems. Dr. Margolis is principal or co-investigator of several federally funded projects that use neuroimaging in longitudinal birth cohorts to study the effects of prenatal exposure to neurotoxicants on brain and behavior outcomes. Most recently, she has served as the text reviser for the chapter on Specific Learning Disorder for DSM-5TR and is co-chair of the ECHO (Environmental Influences on Children's Health Outcomes) National Neurodevelopment Working Group. Recent publications from her lab include papers using functional MRI to study the neural correlates of executive functions in reading disorder, anxiety in reading disorder, and the effects of prenatal exposure to commonly used flame retardants on the efficiency of the brain’s reading network.

John M. Davis, Ph.D., is currently a professor at California State University East Bay, is Chair of the Educational Psychology Department, and is teaching and supervising in the graduate programs for Educational Psychology. He is also in private practice in Lafayette, CA, where he specializes in the assessment of and consultation around learning disorders and disabilities in children, adolescents, and adults. He has also written and co-written more than 40 articles and book chapters on several areas and co-authored 4 books, 3 of which are on learning disorders. He received his doctorate from U.C. Berkeley in School Psychology, received postdoctoral training at U.C. Davis in Clinical/Family Psychology, and interned at the U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and at Children’s Hospital in Oakland. He has worked in the public schools as well as a hospital-based psychiatry department at Kaiser in San Rafael, taught at several universities, and was director of the Raskob Learning Institute in Oakland, CA, an assessment and remediation clinic and a day school for children with learning disorders.