How are dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and dyslexia related?

Posted on by

When dysgraphia and dyscalculia appear alongside dyslexia, the effect isn’t simply additive — it compounds. Writing by hand already overloads working memory; add the demands of manipulating numbers, and a student can easily lose track partway through a problem. Dysgraphia makes it hard to *show what you know* in language arts, and it also swamps working memory during any pencil-and-paper task, including math and science. Dyscalculia, meanwhile, can obscure a student’s genuine talent in math reasoning and problem-solving.

The single most important thing to understand is this: for a long time, a child’s work production may dramatically underestimate their actual understanding. Progress in math with this combination is often non-linear — impossible one year, suddenly effortless a few years later, especially as working memory expands with age (which it does considerably for dyslexic learners). What is *not* usually weak is math reasoning itself. In fact, for many dyslexic students, reasoning and problem-solving are real strengths — they simply get buried beneath slow fact retrieval and laborious handwriting.

Read more HERE

Ambulance service achieves UK first with Gold Dyslexia Friendly Workplace award

Posted on by

The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) has become the first organisation in the UK to achieve the British Dyslexia Association’s Gold Dyslexia Friendly Workplace Quality Mark, recognising its long-term commitment to supporting neurodivergent staff and volunteers.

The accreditation marks another milestone in the Trust’s inclusion journey, having previously achieved the Bronze Quality Mark in 2023, Silver in 2024 and the Inclusive Employer Award later that year.

Read more HERE

Westborough Girl Scout Earns Gold Award for Dyslexia Advocacy

Posted on by

When Westborough resident Kaitlyn Zogg was young, she struggled to understand why she couldn’t pick up spelling like her peers. At age 10, she was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to read, write, and spell.

Now 17 and a rising senior at Notre Dame Academy, Zogg has learned to adopt a positive mindset and, working with her parents Matt and Christina, has strengthened her skills considerably. In June, Zogg founded “Soaring With Dyslexia,” an effort to help people dealing with similar challenges thrive. The project helped her earn the Girl Scout Gold Award.

See it HERE

Neural adaptation in Dyslexia: differential patterns for orthography and phonology

Posted on by

Dysfunction in neural adaptation to words might be at the core of reading impairment. Children with dyslexia can present difficulties recognizing similarities between repeated linguistic stimuli, as evidenced by a lack of reduced activations (adaptation) in brain regions associated with reading. fMRI Rapid Adaptation (fMRI-RA) provides a sensitive index of the quality of orthographic and phonological representations to some degree independent of the access to those representations. We used fMRI-RA to compare neural adaptation in children (10.01–14.16 y.o.) with dyslexia (DYS; n = 32) and typically reading controls (CON; n = 40). Phonological adaptation was measured in the left temporoparietal cortex (TPC) and orthographic adaptation in the left anterior ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT). In TPC, the Group × Condition interaction reached trend level. Planned contrasts, conducted based on a priori hypotheses, were nevertheless consistent with greater phonological selectivity in CON than DYS. Both groups showed comparable orthographic adaptation in VOT. These findings suggest a preserved neural adaptation effect for short, easy, high-frequency words in the VOT in dyslexia group. In sum, reading difficulties may reflect not only single modality deficit but also variations in how orthographic and phonological representations are integrated, highlighting the importance of approaches that examine the interaction between these processes.

Read more HERE