The teacher’s complaints were that she had a reading comprehension problem. This was not the case. She was a good reader and verbally she could recite all about what she read. The teachers complained that her writing was “all over the place”. She had many thoughts but could not coherently organize them into a paragraph, even with the assistance of multiple versions of graphic organizers. So I had a psychological evaluation done for Jessica when she was in third or fourth grade. One of the results of this evaluation was that she had a Visual Processing Disorder. The only explanation the psychologist gave regarding this was that Jessica knows in her mind what a horse looks like but when given a simple block puzzle of a horse to put together, she cannot organize the pieces to make the picture of a horse. “Great! We have identified the problem” I thought to myself. So I started having Jessica do lots of puzzles with me. But that didn’t help so much, because we were focussed on the shapes of the pieces fitting together, not the picture itself, and she could do that. I asked the school and their recommendation was to provide accommodations to her 504 plan to allow for larger print and for her to cover the page she was reading except three or four lines. So we tried that. Nope, that didn’t work. So, I took her to an eye doctor…20/20 vision, no problem here. I find it almost humorous that we have a diagnosis that has a name, but not one person I talked to could explain to me how to correct a Visual Processing Disorder, nor was anyone able to really define to me what was causing this. I can tell you that some of it is developmental, because as she has gotten older, her writing has become more organized and sophisticated. But we struggled with this for years.
So I just found this website that provided the most information on this topic that I have seen, maybe someone has seen or found more, but Understanding Visual Processing Disorders by Beth Arky has some good information. This is not a vision problem. This is a brain functioning problem and guess what? There are eight different types of Visual Processing Disorders! Who knew? Jessica has what is called Visual Closure Issues and here is how this is defined by Understanding Visual Processing Disorders by Beth Arky: Kids have difficulty identifying an object when they are only given the part of the object. Remember that saying, “The whole is equal to the sum of it’s parts”? That is what this explanation made me think of. But these kids can’t put the parts together to make the whole. There are lots of parts to writing a paragraph, but when you have a Visual Processing Disorder such as this, moving the parts from a graphic organizer into a well structured paragraph doesn’t work. What Jessica was able to do was verbally recite a well organized paragraph. So we started recording her speaking the paragraph and then playing it back and writing what she said…nothing visual about that, just verbal and auditory.
Keep coming back because I am building a whole picture about Jessica and how I came to wrap my head around an ASD diagnosis and there are many parts. Thanks for reading my blog!
Being Jessica's Mom: Growing up on the Autistic Spectrum 