Harnessing Intellectual Potential: AI and Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a hidden learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. It is a life-long, genetic condition that is thought to affect around 10% of the population. Dyslexia affects the way information is processed, stored and retrieved, with problems of memory, speed of processing, time perception, organisation and sequencing. Students with dyslexia tend to have difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed. 

Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities, although often because of the difficulties students have with the information processing, they perform below their grade level, particularly on written tests, and their true potential is often not identified by teachers or parents, which can result in longer term behavioural and self esteem issues. 

Dyslexia is not defined only by the fact that sufferers struggle to read and write at the same level as their peers. What many people aren’t aware of, is that people with dyslexia tend to possess other beneficial skills, such as having a different way of thinking or seeing things, meaning that they often approach challenges from angles that no one else could see. This makes them excellent problem solvers, while research also suggests that people with dyslexia are more creative, imaginative and better at memorising things. 

Dyslexic people often have strong visual, creative and problem solving skills and are prominent among entrepreneurs, inventors, architects, engineers and in the arts and entertainment world. However, too often, teachers and parents miss the warning signs and mistake a child with dyslexia to be nervous, dumb, or exhibiting bad behaviour or accept meagre comprehension and fluency skills.

Where, perhaps, we have gone wrong in the past, is to overlook the inherent capabilities of students with dyslexia, by being too focused on their performance of tasks associated with reading and writing, pushing them to perform as competently as their non-dyslexic peers, without actually giving them the tools they need to succeed. This could mean that their capabilities go unseen in a jungle of technicalities and faults related to what might be called the ‘basic’ tasks, like their spelling or ability to read an equation correctly.

We know that reading and writing can make education difficult for those who suffer with the condition – trying to read and type while the words are swimming around on the page with letters upside down and in the wrong order can make for a stressful experience. So, the question remains – what more can be done to ensure students with dyslexia have access to the right solutions?

One way to approach the problems associated with dyslexia is to move away from the tasks that cause difficulties and support them to learn and develop the cognitive skills they need to grow and develop intellectually. Incorporating assistive technology for reading and writing can be a huge support for dyslexic students. Technologies such as audio books, speak selection and other technologies available on tablets and e-readers, as well as smart pens that record what is being said while they’re writing, allowing students to take notes more thoroughly, all enable students to move beyond their technical challenges and into the territory of intellectual development. 

A major resource available to help dyslexic students unlock their full potential is speech recognition software, which can help to release students with dyslexia, and other reluctant or struggling writers, from the burdens relating to using a keyboard and mouse, as well as from issues of spelling and thought flow, which are often such a source of considerable frustration to them. 

Dragon Speech Recognition software from Nuance Communications is the industry leader in speech recognition software and has been developed to help improve productivity for many industries, including in education. In a classroom environment, speech recognition solutions offer a myriad of benefits over using the keyboard and mouse:

• The ability for students to speak their thoughts onto paper – to remove the frustrating block that dyslexia places on them
• High recognition accuracy that adapts to the user the more they use it, for an accurate and seamless speech to written experience, delivering recognition accuracy of up to 99%
• The vocabulary in these intelligent systems is very expansive – mitigating any need to worry about spelling, and providing a more enjoyable, fluid and creative experience when writing class/home work and reducing the stress of education that is heightened for those with dyslexia.

STORIES FROM THE CLASSROOM 

Bethany, a primary school student, shares her thoughts on how dyslexia affects her work and how using voice-recognition software has transformed her experience:

I get the best idea ever and then I write it down and write it down and I miss words out and things like that and then I get to the right part and then I forget…With Dragon, however, when you speak into it you feel you can just be yourself and you can just talk into it. It just transcribes everything and you can get it down just right. 

It makes me feel great. I know when I just write normally, everyone is nearly a page ahead of me and it’s much better because you get your work done very quickly. 

Before I had it, it was just a nightmare really, because I was slow in my work, it was terrible, it was so hard to do everything. After I got to Dragon, it was just like a dream. I got all my ideas down really quickly.

In addition to supporting students with dyslexia, history teacher Marie Evans found that using speech recognition software in the classroom has significant benefits for all students:

In the classroom everybody benefits from it – it’s a very good proofreading tool, it allows very able children as well to just make their work just so much better and present it better. 

The software is incredibly easy to use and I think that’s the real beauty of it. It literally took me half an hour to learn how to use it and that’s why the children love it. Basically the children sit with a headset on with a microphone and what they say comes up on the screen. They can edit it by voice as well – they don’t have to type on a keyboard.

It’s amazing. Children that I had no idea really of how intelligent they really were finally producing work that was really incredible. They feel proud that their work is actually really well presented. Instead of producing work at about 7 words a minute, using Dragon they can now actually produce work at 100 words per minute.

Evans has also found the software to be useful in saving her time with writing student reports and being able to give more in-depth feedback since speaking is a more natural and faster way for her to respond to students’ work. 

Technology paving the way for dyslexic students

Even though they are a statistical minority, students like Bethany are facing hiking up the same educational mountains as their peers, which can impact on their psychological well-being. It is encouraging, however, that through recent in-depth studies and research, more advances have been made to understand dyslexia in full, rather than accepting out-dated misconceptions. This new awareness makes way for a focus on how it affects individuals differently and what needs to be done to provide them with the right type of support throughout their time in education.

The extensive improvements that have been made to the PC over the last 10 years have changed the way we value our technology, making it easier with more user-friendly seamless experiences. This has happened in parallel with the wave of developments that have been made to speech recognition software. And because we are offering increasingly more advanced tech in classrooms, the potential is there for our educational technological solutions to be more sophisticated than ever. The average PC is more powerful than it was previously, and processor and memory advances make them better equipped to allow users to get the most out of speech recognition’s seamless performance. Today, that performance is characterised by its high accuracy rates plus the ability to transcribe at up to 160 words per minute, meaning the conversion of thoughts into words, speech to screen, is now easier and quicker than ever before.

The power to transform

In a world where technology has become a seamless extra limb in all walks of life, the invaluable resources it provides should be extended to our students, especially those who struggle with conditions like dyslexia. And while speech recognition and other tools for students can never eradicate all the inevitable hours of coursework or homework they’ll have to complete throughout education, they can provide a better and less daunting way to work. In helping to capture their thoughts by writing in a faster, easier and more creative way, they can feel confident working from an equal platform that gives them the same opportunities as their peers to realise their own academic potential. 

Mark Geremia, is vice president and general manager for Nuance’s Dragon Professional and Consumer. https://www.nuance.com/en-gb/dragon.html