Up to 80% of the information that is presented to children in the classroom is actually visual. It's safe to say that vision can have an enormous impact on children's academic performance. If children show up at school every day without some of the tools they need to succeed, no matter how smart or capable we may think they are, they will have trouble performing at their grade or age level equivalents. Consequently, that child may work 10 times harder than another child because they lack the tools that they need to succeed.
Visual skills that may affect child's academic performance
Visual skills that may affect a child's academic performance include having difficulty with visual acquisition, i.e., having difficulty acquiring visual information, getting it into the eyes, and back into the brain. These could include eye tracking, using eyes together as a team which is called binocular vision, or problems with the accommodative and focusing muscles.
Children may also have difficulty processing visual information once the information reaches the brain. For example there could be a problem with the child's ability to convert short-term memories to long-term ones. If your child struggles with any of these skills, it's important to rule in or out an underlying vision problem that could negatively affect academic performance.
Signs of a learning-related vision problem
Your child may exhibit a number of signs and symptoms that indicate they have a vision problem that is affecting their learning ability. A proper assessment and treatment, if necessary, can be carried out quickly to ensure that a minor issue does not turn into a major one.
There are a number of them, including:
- Eye irritation
- Having to squint to see the blackboard in class
- Blurry vision
- Difficulty reading for long periods of time
- Poor reading comprehension
- Difficulty focusing
- Frequent headaches
- Head tilting
- Fatigue
- Dizziness or balance issues
