Dys-what-ia?

Understanding dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia

WORDS AMANDA COLLINS BERNIER

CHANTEL MACK FIRST NOTICED something different about her youngest child when she was just a toddler. While most kids master their colors around age 2, her daughter struggled to learn them until she was almost 5. Later came difficulty with spelling, reading and writing. Then, when her daughter started school, things got even more challenging.

But Mack knew her little girl was smart. “Her common sense was always better than my other kids,” the Fort Worth mom of three says. So when in second grade her daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia, it all made sense.

Dyslexia, a learning difference characterized by difficulty reading, is the most commonly diagnosed learning disability, affecting as many as one in five people by some estimates. But it is just one of the ways the brain may work and process differently.

For a child to struggle at some point with reading, writing and math isn’t out of the ordinary, but to struggle persistently— despite their effort—could be a sign of learning disability like dyslexia, dysgraphia or dyscalculia. Though they share some similarities, these learning differences present and impact children in unique ways. Here are some of the differences and nuances of each.

WHAT IS DYSLEXIA?

Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty learning to read and also affects spelling. “One of the most consistent challenges in dyslexia is difficulty learning to isolate individual sounds in spoken language, referred to as phonemes,” explains Dr. Sheryl Frierson, medical director of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children in Dallas. This difficulty in picking out individual sounds in spoken words makes it challenging to connect which letters correspond to spoken sounds.

“Another complication is that the rules for letter-sound correspondence are specific to each language, so Spanish letter-sound rules are different than English letter-sound rules,” Frierson shares.

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS OF DYSLEXIA?

• Trouble learning letter names and remembering the sounds they make• Difficulty “sounding out” words when reading• Difficulty learning to correctly spell words when writing• Struggling to read and spell common sight words• Difficulty memorizing math facts• Confusing letters that look or sound similar• Trouble separating individual sounds in words• Trouble blending sounds to make a word

WHAT IS DYSGRAPHIA?

This learning disorder is characterized by slow and/or illegible handwriting. “It is not a problem with the muscles used for writing. Instead, it is a problem with the ability to recall details about how to write words on paper, referred to as orthographic memory,” explains Frierson. This makes it difficult for a person to learn the sequence of muscle movements needed to write recognizable letters.

Frierson puts it this way: “Think about the idea that every time you’re going to write the letter A, you have to think about how you’re going to make it rather than have the automatic muscle memory. It’s going to look different each time you write it; it may not come out the way you want.”

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS OF DYSGRAPHIA?

Frierson notes that dysgraphia-related spelling errors are different than the letter-sound correspondence errors seen in dyslexia. Other symptoms include:

• Inconsistent, illegible handwriting• Handwriting slower than peers• Many mark-overs, erasing• Excessive and unusual letter reversals• Writing correct letters in the wrong order

WHAT IS DYSCALCULIA?

This learning disability is characterized by difficulty learning mathematics and understanding how numbers work. “Students with dyscalculia tend to have difficulty understanding how we use numbers to stand for quantities, how these quantities follow a sequence (number line), and how different operations, for example adding or subtracting, can be applied to numbers to solve everyday problems,” says Frierson.

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS OF DYSCALCULIA?

• Difficulty recognizing numbers• Delayed in learning to count• Difficulty connecting numerical symbols to their corresponding words• Losing track when counting• Difficulty recognizing patterns

WHO IS PREDISPOSED TO THESE LEARNING DIFFERENCES?

Dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia occur across people of all backgrounds. Often, learning disabilities run in families. It’s also common that learning differences co-occur.

“It is estimated that at least 30% and, depending on the study, as many as 70% of students with dyslexia also have a specific learning disorder in either writing, or math, or both,” says Frierson. “In my practice, dyslexia and dysgraphia are the most common to occur together. This makes sense since both involve translating back and forth between spoken and written words whereas number knowledge is unique to dyscalculia. However, it is not uncommon for students to have difficulty in all three areas.”

DIAGNOSING DYSLEXIA, DYSGRAPHIA AND DYSCALCULIA

Specific learning disorders are not typically identified until children are school-aged. In Texas public schools, children are screened for dyslexia in kindergarten and first grade. “This screening is not the same as a formal evaluation, but it can help identify students who should receive extra exposure to good regular education instruction and/or targeted intervention,” says Frierson. She estimates that most children seen for diagnosis at Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders are between the ages of 7 to 9.

Specific learning disorders are diagnosed by a formal evaluation by an assessment specialist. The evaluation may include literacy skills, reading, writing, and mathematics testing and an assessment of language, thinking and reasoning skills. And because learning disorders can sometimes overlap—someone with dyslexia, for example, might struggle with word problems in math—experts tease out how much of the difficulty a child is having in one subject is a primary problem with those concepts, or if it’s because of some other interference.

“All this information is then interpreted by a specialist in the context of your child’s educational history, report card history, benchmark testing, and educator and parent observations. Test scores are helpful, but a qualified specialist will also assess your child’s behavior during the testing and consider all the prior information to help make an informed diagnosis or identification of eligibility for services,” says Frierson.

Parents have a right to request an evaluation from their public school at any time. If you suspect your child may have a learning disability, Frierson recommends that parents start there.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EARLY INTERVENTION

People don’t outgrow learning disabilities, but with the right strategies and support, they can thrive. For Mack’s daughter, that was working with a specialist for an hour a day.

It’s important that kids get these supports sooner than later. Children with untreated learning disabilities are more at risk for social and emotional problems like low self-esteem, anxiety or depression, or feeling like failures. These impacts, as well as the struggle to learn, become cumulative with time.

“One of the things we have learned from research is that if you don’t do something [about a learning disability], there’s a gap in learning between yourself and your peers and that gap is now very difficult to narrow as you go forward. If we can begin providing more explicit instruction, more explicit support before we get to second grade, we’re hopeful that we won’t have that big gap,” says Frierson. “We’re not saying, ‘You’re going to deal with this.’ We’re saying, ‘There’s a lot we can do so that this doesn’t cause you as much problems as it would if you had waited.’”