The Connection Between Learning Difficulties and Vision

Considering 80% of the information you process comes  through your visual system, it’s not surprising that a vision problem  can affect a number of different subjects. Here’s a brief overview of  how vision problems can manifest in various areas.

Vision problems affect reading in two significant ways:

• When a student is learning to read, a serious  vision problem could reduce their ability to know what they are looking  at and impact their ability to remember numbers and letters.

• When a student is reading to learn and has  blurry or double vision, their ability to read for long periods of time  and comprehend what they are reading can be severely reduced.

The ability to read and the ability to comprehend  what is being read are two different things. 

Comprehending what is read  is a visual process, and can be affected when the visual system is not  working correctly. If a student sees words on the page as blurry or  double, he or she has to use extra effort to keep the words single and  clear and this can negatively impact comprehension.

Students with vision problems spend the majority  of their time decoding words. Instead of reading fluidly and visualizing  the words and the message as a whole, they focus on each specific word.  This is a struggle, making it difficult to quickly process sections of  text.

As a result, students will track text with their  fingers. They’ll read a slower pace and will have fluency issues. Their  reading will be marred by repetitions, insertions, omissions and  substitutions. These reading problems are all too often misconstrued as  laziness on the part of the student. They are not. They are simply  symptomatic of a vision problem. When corrected, it’s common for  students to enjoy reading and no longer avoid it.

Here is a demo which simulates the amount of effort an individual with a tracking difficulty exerts  when trying to read. Before phonetics and before sight words, the  mechanical movements of the eyes in the reading process should have  developed and should operate freely and accurately. When there are  unexpected developmental difficulties, reading rate will decrease and  often is choppy. In addition, comprehension decreases as the individual  is taking so much energy trying to do the mechanical movements of the  eyes in the reading process that the individual has less energy left for  the learning and comprehension. Does it make sense that an individual  with poor eye movement skills will have more difficulty than a child  with good eye movements? Optometric vision therapy can remediate these  inefficient visual skills and make the child receptive and ready to  learn.

Read more about eye tracking dysfunctions and how they impact a child's ability to learn and to read.

If a student has difficulty seeing things as clear  and single, they may have trouble seeing decimals and/or signs. An important skill in math is to organize what is being written and the student may have trouble lining things up and keeping their place if their visual skills are poor.  This could be due to poor eye tracking or binocularity instability.

Laterality and directionality (concrete understanding of left and right and the ability to project those out into space) are also important concepts in math. If a student sees the orientation of numbers  incorrectly, they will have difficulty completing the problem.

Students who lack visualization skills can often be found counting on their fingers or verbalizing sequences. Given  enough time, they can generally compute an answer, but they tend to do poorly on timed tests. Awareness of numbers and what they mean as well as being able to visualize numbers and quantities, are critical to  success in math and can be impacted if a child has a vision problem.

It should be noted that a child with vision  problems may do well in math but be a poor reader, primarily because  math doesn’t require as many precise eye movements as reading.

Visual recall, the ability to create a visual  image based on past visual experience without currently having that  experience, is a visualization skill that is critical for spelling. In  spelling, it is the ability to create a mental image of a word without  being able to look at the word.

Writing involves both handwriting and composition  skills. It is necessary for vision to lead the hand for handwriting and  this can be very difficult if the student cannot see well. In fact,  often you can see in the handwriting where the student stopped looking  or became fatigued. Difficulty writing straight on a page is often a result of poor peripheral awareness.

There are several vision-related skills that are  critical to good handwriting that may be underdeveloped in a student  with vision problems. Visualization is also important in handwriting  because the student needs to remember what different words look like in  order to reproduce them on the page. Spatial concepts are important in  handwriting to know and plan how words will go together. Good laterality  and directionality are important to differentiate similarly shaped  letters in different orientations (e.g. b, d, p, q).

Visualization is also critical for writing  composition because the student needs to be able to organize and  re-organize the composition in his or her head.

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See the College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) article:  Learning Related Vision Problems & Vision Therapy - Facts and Figures