This session, the General Assembly is taking a closer look at dyslexia in Connecticut’s schools. According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, dyslexia is a language processing disorder that can cause academic problems with reading, writing, spelling, and mathematics. Among other things, SB 120 would expand training for educators in detecting and recognizing students with dyslexia. While the General Assembly considers ways to address dyslexia, a recent Oxford University study on the subject is turning heads: its findings suggest that playing video games could be therapeutic for students with dyslexia.
The researchers, led by experimental psychologist Vanessa Harrar, approached dyslexia as an attention problem rather than a phonetic problem, which in the past has led to treatments aimed at improving reading skills, word recognition, and phonetics. Harrar and her team, though, focused on attention, finding that people with dyslexia have a delayed reaction when shifting their attention between sights and sounds compared to those without dyslexia. They also found that playing action video games for 12 hours can actually “drastically improve” reading ability without any traditional phonological training. Because video games require players to respond quickly and constantly shift visual attention around the screen, they may help people with dyslexia to shift more quickly between visual and audio stimuli. Harrar’s study was published in the February 2013 edition of Current Biology.
You can read more about the status of dyslexia in Connecticut’s special education programs in OLR Report 2014-R-0058.
