My 8-year-old son's educational psychologist report revealed he had visual processing problems
Vision is complicated
Understanding visual processing problems in children with dyslexia
"My 8-year-old son's Educational Psychologist Report revealed he had visual processing problems. I am so confused because I take him to the optician to get his eyes checked regularly and they never mentioned any problems."
Parents are often baffled when they learn that, despite due care and diligence, they have missed their child’s visual processing difficulties.
How does getting vision tested help our eyes?
Going to the optician and getting your child's eyes checked is critical as a first step. They check the eyes' health and see if issues relate to how well each lens can see up close and at a distance. If there are issues with focusing, then opticians prescribe glasses. This is important for situations where, for example, your child struggles to see what’s on the whiteboard in class, or gets frequent headaches from eyestrain.
However, getting high-definition information from our eyes is only half of the story. Our eyes absorb the visual data, but our brain interprets what we see. Look at the picture below, can you see both the old lady and the young lady in the same picture? Depending on the lines we focus our attention on, we can see both images. Our understanding of the situation shifts based on how the brain interprets the pattern.
The necklace of the young lady is the mouth of the old lady. How the brain connects meaning to what we see is fascinating.
Can you see both the
old and
young lady in this image?
Why is visual processing important at school?
Visual processing is an umbrella term for several activities the eyes and brain must perform together. The success of these activities is fundamental to learning as they affect reading, copying, and understanding what is being read.
“Visual processing can be best described as how the brain, eyes and its muscles perform together.”
The eyes are controlled by a set of muscles that help them each move in different directions. If these eye muscles are underdeveloped, they can not move with the agility needed and this in turn affects what is understood by the brain. So, visual processing can be best described as how the brain, eyes and its muscles perform together. The regular optician does not test for visual processing. As parents, you can look out for the following academic indicators of poor visual processing:
Eye-tracking difficulties
If your child cannot move their eyes smoothly across a horizontal line of a script when reading, or vertically when calculating column sums, it is considered a tracking difficulty.
Fixation/Saccadic difficulties
When reading the eyes make very tiny movements, sequentially from one point of information to the next,. These movements are called saccades and between each saccade their eyes fix or focus on what is being read If your child re-reads words or skips back or forward in a sentence, it will come under fixation/saccadic problems.
Binocular instability
If both eyes do not move well together as a team to form one picture, then there are binocular visual difficulties. Often these children see double, since they are seeing different images from each eye instead of both eyes seeing the image as a whole.
Convergence and divergence insufficiency
If they have difficulties throwing and catching a ball, then there may be difficulties with convergence and divergence. Convergence is needed to focus on a close-up task, such as reading, whereas divergence is needed to track something from further away, such as a garden bird. Your child needs to be able to switch between both at speed, for example, when copying down notes from a whiteboard.
Poor field of vision
Those children with a poor field of vision, or peripheral vision, can only focus on one item at a time and may find it a challenge to see the full line on a page. If playing a team game, they may not notice who is around them when playing on the sports field.
Visual perceptual difficulties
If your child continues to confuse letters such as “b” and “d” or misread words such as “spot” and “stop” beyond the developmental phase (after six years of age) then this would be considered visual-perceptual difficulties.
“It is no surprise that many visual processing problems co-exist in a child with learning difficulties.”
How does visual processing affect learning?
It is no surprise that many visual processing problems co-exist in a child with neurodivergent conditions. Children with ADHD, Dyslexia, DCD (Dyspraxia) and Autism often have undetected visual processing difficulties, and this, in turn, can hinder learning by slowing down how words are absorbed and understood. Parents with children with SEN (special educational needs) can learn a lot by watching their child read, and help detect the warning signs of Visual Processing Difficulties, such as:
Tracking, Fixation and Saccadic problems result in slow reading speed.
Convergence problems result in feeling tired or exhausted when reading and even falling asleep because the eye muscles cannot hold that position for long periods.
When the field of vision is poor, children read one or two words at a time and do not link the words with ease to form a flowing sentence
Those who see letters in reverse are unsure of what sound to produce so phonic and phonological understanding is weak.
When a child has one or more of these difficulties, they may read every sentence twice; first to decode what each word is, and then to understand the actual meaning of the sentence. This can be disheartening at school when one of their classmates has completed a worksheet and they are still trying to parse the first question.
Children who mix up the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’ when reading will also do this when writing.
How we help children with visual processing problems.
Raviv Practice London uses one-to-one therapy with a multifold tailored approach for children with one or more visual processing difficulties. It takes around six weeks to stop children from reversing their letters, and once they are sure of the letter direction, they can read with less difficulty. We have a dual approach of eye movement exercises as part of our one-to-one therapy programs, combined with a tried-and-tested phonics program such as Alpha to Omega by Beve Hornsby. We can make visible changes to how children process visual information in as little as 12 weeks, and progress their reading age. All our follow-on reading programs can be delivered online through remote intervention as well as face-to-face. If you think your child may be experiencing difficulties linked to visual processing, let’s chat about how we can help.
Dyslexia? Dyspraxia? ADHD? ASD? Speech & Language? Developmental Delay? Anxiety?
Is every school day a struggle? As a parent, you may feel exhausted and on this journey alone. Each year you see the gap getting wider. You need to do something - change the approach, help your child learn for themselves, find a way to turn this around - to help while you can - do this NOW. the first step is free.
