Table of Contents
Definition of Dysgraphia
Dysgraphia is a learning difficulty where a person has trouble writing because of how their brain processes written language. It is one of the most common learning difficulties and can affect a student’s ability to communicate in writing significantly.
Recent research suggests that between 10-20% of schoolchildren will struggle with dysgraphia at some point in their schooling. (Mittal et al.) With the proper tools and guidance, these students can often find ways to be equally as successful as their peers and not be held back in life by their differences.
Dysgraphia has no connection to intelligence or ability in other domains. Students with dysgraphia may present normally when discussing topics verbally and doing tasks not related to writing, but will have a notable area of weakness when writing.
Dysgraphia is often confused with dyspraxia. Despite the similarities in how they can affect writing, dyspraxia is a difficulty with fine motor skills, while dysgraphia is a difference in how written language is processed in the brain. They can occur comorbidly, however, so it is important to look at the specific challenges the student is facing rather than focusing too much on a label.
Students with dysgraphia can absolutely improve in their writing skills and should not simply be allowed to skip anything connected with writing. Teachers need to ensure they have at least a fundamental level of writing ability to be able to communicate clearly in future work and study conditions.
Identifying Dysgraphia in the Classroom
Students who are diagnosed with Dysgraphia are often described by their teachers as:
- Often writing sentences that do not make sense.
- Flipping letters when writing.
- Struggling with even simple spelling.
- Confusing capital and lowercase letters.
- Skipping certain grammatical words consistently.
- Not understanding their writing after first putting it down.
- Having trouble taking notes.
5 Targeted Interventions for Dysgraphia
- Utilize text to speech.
One of the simplest and quickest ways to help students with writing difficulties is to help them learn how to use text to speech programs. These programs may not be perfect, and require a good amount of practice to be able to utilize effectively, but they work for students with dysgraphia because they can use their stronger speaking skills to circumvent their writing difficulties.
While text to speech programs can be helpful as a way to avoid the problems brought on by dysgraphia, it is important that it not be relied on too heavily and traditional writing skills completely undeveloped. There will be times that the student may not be able to use their text to speech program when writing and those times will be infinitely harder if teachers do not help them to gain a foundational level of competency.
However, text to speech programs can relieve so much mental energy for students with dysgraphia. When not focusing directly on improving traditional writing skills, using text to speech programs can free up significant mental resources for the students to focus on the learning task at hand.
- Consider letting them type.
Depending on the specific difficulties the individual student is struggling with, a computer might be a good middle ground between text to speech and handwriting. When typing, students do not need to focus on remembering proper letter formation and spellcheck and typing suggestions can help them to avoid other common difficulties for students with dysgraphia.
Other students may not be helped much by moving to a computer. If their issues are sentence construction, grammar, or proper capitalization, a computer may not do much to improve their performance. However, typing may simply just be a way that the student feels more comfortable and natural when writing due to the widespread use of phones, tablets, and computers in children.
As with the text to speech program, typing instead of writing needs to not be used to completely replace handwriting. While not as crucial in our modern world, all students need to be able to legibly write their name and basic information down in a patient form if they have a medical appointment or fill in an application for something with a government or bank that still requires paper copies
Typing, especially if allowed for note taking, can drastically improve many students’ writing capabilities whether they have dysgraphia or not. Typing also allows students to interlink their notes with embedded resources and also prevents notes from being misplaced. Because of this, note taking may often be more efficiently done via typing even though writing information down by hand has been shown to be linked to higher memory. Each individual student will need to find an approach to saving information for later study depending on what works for them personally.
- Tell them to read what they have written out loud.
One of the most frustrating and disheartening aspects for students with dysgraphia is the struggle to get their clear thoughts out of their head only to end up a confused mess on the paper. This can cause students with dysgraphia to feel that they are stupid in a general sense as well as no matter what they try to learn, they struggle to show anyone else what they understand.
A way to simultaneously circumvent the issue and improve the underlying causes is to have students write a paragraph and then read back what they have written aloud. This activates not only their reading and writing centers through vision alone, but also through hearing. Mistakes and missing words are much easier for students with dysgraphia to notice when they hear them instead of simply autocorrecting in their brain when reading silently.
This not only allows them to use a stronger sense to avoid their struggling processing, but also helps them to improve their abilities by noticing and correcting their errors more frequently. Over time, students will improve with this strategy as they get better at noticing their errors through hearing and get quicker at fixing issues in the proofreading phase of a writing task.
- Have them listen to someone else read their writing back to them.
If students still struggle to notice their mistakes or know how to fix them, they may need to hear their work read by someone other than themselves as a scaffold. If the teacher is the one reading the work, they can subtly emphasize areas with errors to signal that there is something the student needs to reconsider at that point.
This will give the benefits of activating the auditory cortex in addition to providing a simple way for the teacher to give more or less guidance as the student improves over time. The goal for a teacher should always be student independence and not overreliance.
These tools can be great for scaffolding as the student develops their basic skills, but eventually that educational scaffolding needs to come down to show the reinforced and refurbished new student beneath. In the end, the teacher will simply need to use their professional judgment to decide when it is appropriate to place and slowly remove scaffolds with each individual student depending on their problems and progress as they improve.
- Consider alternatives to note taking.
For some students, note taking may be a completely useless exercise. If students are taking notes that they can not even understand minutes after writing them, then they are not going to be a useful study tool. Writing takes a lot of energy for students with dysgraphia and if the end result is a student who is thinking more about writing notes than listening and learning who also has nothing to refer back to, their energy may be better spent elsewhere.
One approach could be for them to highlight books and handouts. If the student highlights important things to reread as they read, they will still have something to refer back to that summarizes the main points they need to review when preparing for a test.
This will allow them to still have something to use when studying and preparing for tests as well as letting them use their mental energy to listen and participate in class discussions rather than be too focused trying to keep up with writing everything down.
Conclusion
Students with dysgraphia may struggle to feel like they can improve, but with consistent practice using the right tools in a safe and supportive environment, they can absolutely gain the skills they need to be successful in life. Teachers should focus on arming students with useful tools and strategies that they can use for a lifetime rather than short term ways to avoid the issue.
Using tools like text to speech, computers, and reading their work aloud will allow them to strengthen their areas of weakness. Helping them to find their own way to note important things during the lesson can relieve a lot of pressure and make studying a lot easier.
Teachers should focus on keeping up their spirits and ensuring they regularly use whatever approaches to learning are agreed upon whether that be text to speech or training their auditory system to hear their written mistakes. Programs and approaches to learning like this need to be consistently practiced to make writing easier and not simply be another difficulty to deal with.
With consistent practice, students with dysgraphia can gain confidence and be able to express themselves more clearly. Writing is an unnatural skill for humans, so many students may always struggle to write as well as they speak, but these tools can help improve writing skills in those with official dysgraphia or just those who simply want to learn to write more clearly and miss fewer typos and errors.
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References
Mittal, Dolly, et al. “Identification of Dysgraphia: A Comparative Review.” Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2022, pp. 52–62., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07012-9_5.
