The Seattle Times – John Higgins
“About 36 percent of the students receiving special education services in the United States have normal intelligence, but struggle with reading, writing, speaking and doing math. Dyslexia is one of the most common of those disabilities and involves problems with reading and spelling words. Dysgraphia is a lesser known disorder that impairs handwriting, and also is characterized by poor spelling, but may not affect reading ability. Federal special education law lumps them under one category, but new research from the University of Washington makes the case that they are distinct disorders that require different types of instruction. The researchers scanned the brains of 40 children in grades 4-9 who were diagnosed as having dyslexia, dysgraphia or were typically developing readers and writers. The study’s lead author, Todd Richards, a UW radiologist, and his colleagues recorded the kids’ brain activity as they performed different tasks such as filling in a missing letter in a word or planning a composition about space travel they would write later outside the scanner.”(more)