Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.
Only fair attention with an unusually strong working memory is a signal rather than a strength to celebrate. The memory is carrying something. Look next at the sound skills and the motor scores, since that is usually where the load is coming from. The person's own account often settles it, because they will describe remembering things rather than working them out.
Qur’an and Sunnah
My brother Aaron is more eloquent than I (Quran 28:34). Moses names a peak and a trough in the same breath and neither one cancels the other, which is what an uneven profile actually looks like.
وَأَخِي هَٰرُونُ هُوَ أَفۡصَحُ مِنِّي لِسَانࣰ ا فَأَرۡسِلۡهُ مَعِيَ رِدۡءࣰ ا يُصَدِّقُنِيٓۖ إِنِّيٓ أَخَافُ أَن يُكَذِّبُونِ
My brother Aaron is more eloquent than I: send him with me to help me and confirm my words- I fear they may call me a liar.’
Qur’an 28:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The multiple deficit account, from a theoretical review, holds that dyslexia arises from several interacting risk factors, which is why profiles come out uneven and why two children with one label can look nothing alike. It is a model rather than a validated rule for reading score patterns. Use it as a prompt to look further, not as a sign that stands on its own.
van Bergen E, van der Leij A, de Jong PF. (2014). The intergenerational multiple deficit model and the case of dyslexia.. Frontiers in human neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An unusually high score can show what someone has had to build, not only what came easily to them.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
If a child is behind in reading, the gap rarely closes on its own with another year of the same. Asking for a proper assessment now is kinder than hoping that maturity will do the work.
Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.