AI

Harnessing Intellectual Potential: AI and Dyslexia

Students with dyslexia often have challenges with tasks associated with reading and writing and can find written work frustrating. Artificial Intelligence technology is transforming the lives of dyslexic students at all levels with speech recognition tools that are supporting their creative and intellectual development.
Teacher observing students using technology

Dyslexia is a hidden learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. It is a life-long, genetic condition that is thought to affect around 10% of the population. Dyslexia affects the way information is processed, stored and retrieved, with problems of memory, speed of processing, time perception, organisation and sequencing. Students with dyslexia tend to have difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed. 

Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities, although often because of the difficulties students have with the information processing, they perform below their grade level, particularly on written tests, and their true potential is often not identified by teachers or parents, which can result in longer term behavioural and self esteem issues. 

Dyslexia is not defined only by the fact that sufferers struggle to read and write at the same level as their peers. What many people aren’t aware of, is that people with dyslexia tend to possess other beneficial skills, such as having a different way of thinking or seeing things, meaning that they often approach challenges from angles that no one else could see. This makes them excellent problem solvers, while research also suggests that people with dyslexia are more creative, imaginative and better at memorising things. 

Dyslexic people often have strong visual, creative and problem solving skills and are prominent among entrepreneurs, inventors, architects, engineers and in the arts and entertainment world. However, too often, teachers and parents miss the warning signs and mistake a child with dyslexia to be nervous, dumb, or exhibiting bad behaviour or accept meagre comprehension and fluency skills.

Where, perhaps, we have gone wrong in the past, is to overlook the inherent capabilities of students with dyslexia, by being too focused on their performance of tasks associated with reading and writing, pushing them to perform as competently as their non-dyslexic peers, without actually giving them the tools they need to succeed. This could mean that their capabilities go unseen in a jungle of technicalities and faults related to what might be called the ‘basic’ tasks, like their spelling or ability to read an equation correctly.

We know that reading and writing can make education difficult for those who suffer with the condition – trying to read and type while the words are swimming around on the page with letters upside down and in the wrong order can make for a stressful experience. So, the question remains – what more can be done to ensure students with dyslexia have access to the right solutions?

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