Children with dyslexia should be screened for hearing problems, says a UK researcher, after her research team found that 1 in 4 students had significant hearing problems that were not suspected by parents. Their study also found that 1 in 3 children with a hearing...
![Processing Speed & Writing [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-10.47.06-AM.jpg)
Question: I know my son’s processing speed is slow from his testing, but how slow should his speed on something like writing take? My son has slow processing speed, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a loose attention control system – but how long should it take him to write a 5 paragraph academic paper… after which the paper still needs revisions? It takes him hours to complete assignments. This is a great question…but of course, the answer depends on a lot of individual factors regarding your student. When essay or paper writing takes so long, it’s good to try to troubleshoot ways to make the process quicker. If the delay occurs at the beginning, before any ‘writing’ occurs, then maybe he doesn’t have a template in which […]
![Organizing Tips for the Dyslexic Academic [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.50.54-PM.jpg)
A request came through from one of our Premium subscribers. What strategies are helpful for the dyslexic academic or working professional who needs to organize and synthesize from large quantities of information? The first step is SIMPLIFY. Argument Mapping As Dyslexic PhD Dr. Emma Jeffries says in her video below, looking for the key points in an argument helps her map the essence of what a journal article or paper is presenting. When she has a big text or paper that she has to read, she uses key questions to focus her reading. Sometimes a mentor or professor can also focus your reading on key topics or questions. Emma describes how she sketches notes that help get the gist of data that she is analyzing. […]
![Dyslexia at College: THE CHALLENGE OF WRITING [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.43.51-PM.jpg)
As dyslexic college students are entering 2- and 4- year colleges in increasing numbers, questions arise as to the impact of dyslexia-related challenges on essay writing. The National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 had found that although a majority of LD students in high school requested accommodations (91%), only 17% requested accommodations in college. A problem with this situation is that the net result is that written work (especially timed written work) will typically substantially underestimate a student’s fund of knowledge and understanding. A recent study at Oxford Brookes University showed that college students with dyslexia matched their non-dyslexic peers in terms of word diversity, ideas, organization, sentence structure, and even grammar. The tasks in which they scored lower than their peers were so-called “low-level transcription skills” […]
![The Curious History of Mirror Writing [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.56.30-PM.jpg)
“As a researcher, working over two decades with hundreds of children and adults with dyslexia, I’m convinced that Leonard Da Vinci was dyslexic.” – Dr Maryann Wolf, author Proust and the Squid Mirror writing occurs commonly in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children between the ages of 3 and 7 years, however a subset of children will have persistent difficulties with letter reversals – and these children (or adults) will be more likely to have significant dyslexia or other LD. It at least one study, mirror writing was thought to occur in only ~ 10% of dyslexics, but its been estimated to be 30% of lefties. Even if mirror writing is only a significant problem in a minority of dyslexics – this rate is 16-fold higher than […]
“English A was ‘a disaster and French was like medieval torture. To sit down with a blank piece of paper and write was the most traumatic thing that had ever faced me in life. I had ideas in my head, but I could not get the stuff down. It was a crushing time.” – Charles Schwab “It will be particularly helpful if they give themselves practice in precis writing, paraphrasing, and note-taking. If one has to write a precis one is forced not only to think out carefully what are the key ideas in a particular passage but also to express them concisely, accurately, and clearly. Paraphrasing makes similar demands and also forces one to consider the style of the original and to be critical […]
![WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM A CHILD’S WRITING [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Screen-Shot-2019-09-03-at-2.11.37-PM.jpg)
There are many skills that are required to write by hand. Besides having an idea and being able to organize it into words, there’s remembering the motor, kinesthetic, and visual sequences of letters and words and being able to discern similar and dissimilar sounds (auditory processing, phonemic awareness). No wonder it’s hard to write! What do you see in the following writing? Mix of capitals and lower case letters, irregular spacing, sight word error (plaid instead of played), phonemic error (chr instead of tr), elision / dropped sound or attention / working memory mistake (chis instead of chips). This student would benefit from working with an alphabet strip of lower and upper case letters in view as well as a spelling or writing […]
![Latest Research: Repetition As a Poor Way to Teach Dyslexics [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/shutterstock_133874900.jpg)
In groundbreaking research, researchers at MIT or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that dyslexic children and adults have “a diminished ability to acclimate to a repeated input in their paper titled “Dysfunction of Rapid Neural Adaption in Dyslexia.” Like many research papers, dyslexia is seen through a negative lens (‘dysfunction’) and the take-home points through university press releases, similarly so, however the findings are interesting ones and fit with an evolving picture of dyslexia as a learning difference (rather than disease or disability) that extends beyond reading and has ramifications for many aspects of education. “It’s a difference in the brain that’s not about reading per se, but it’s a difference in perceptual learning that’s pretty broad,” says John Gabrieli, who is the study’s […]
"...He explained that there is a Tibetan saying that it is the painful experiences that shine the light on the nature of happiness... The Archbishop added that that “nothing beautiful comes without some suffering,” and he mentioned how our muscles need resistance to...
![Why It’s Hard to Proofread and Read Fluently [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2017-10-07-at-1.49.34-PM.png)
It can be maddening. You look and look you just don’t see it. Later you pass your work along, you see all the thing you hadn’t seen the first time round. What’s going on ? You’ve experienced a ‘trick’ of perception. In our clinic, when trying to explain the phenomenon to children, we often use the analogy of optical illusions…when you see something that’s not there or you miss something – that later you can’t believe you could see at the start. These tricks of perception are what adds to the time needed for many dyslexic students on classroom and standardized exams. It accounts for why some teachers may be flabbergasted by a student’s need for extended time, when they seem so quick with problem solving […]
![Understanding Processing Speed and Dyslexia [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/shutterstock_111687563.jpg)
When families come together to discuss test scores, no group of scores surprises them as much as “Processing Speed.” Processing Speed scores on psychometric exams might mean Coding and Symbol Search scores on the WISC intelligence exams or Visual Matching and Paired Cancellation on the Woodcock Johnson. Processing Speed scores on these subtests are typically lower for dyslexic students, but on other tasks like Decision Making and in real life, these students may be quite quick and even quicker than their peers at various tasks such as insight-based problem solving or situational awareness (helpful for athletics, for instance). Understanding the true significance of Processing Speed Difference in Dyslexia, then is important not only for recognizing when accommodations may be appropriate school, but also for identifying […]
![[Premium] Examples of Dysgraphia and Dyslexia – What to Look For](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/dysgraphia-dyslexia.jpg)
After dyslexic students make progress in their ability to decode words, parents, teachers, and students themselves may begin to breathe a sigh of relief; however, another monster challenge may be looming on the horizon – the other D…. Dysgraphia. The National Institutes of Health definition of Dysgraphia includes the following: “Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder characterized by writing disabilities. Specifically, the disorder causes a person’s writing to be distorted or incorrect. In children, the disorder generally emerges when they are first introduced to writing. They make inappropriately sized and spaced letters, or write wrong or misspelled words, despite thorough instruction. Children with the disorder may have other learning disabilities; however, they usually have no social or other academic problems. Cases of dysgraphia in adults generally […]
