Understanding Slow Processing - how to function in a world that values speed

 Do you ask your child questions and wait a long time for them to respond? 

Do you get frustrated that when you are in a hurry to leave the house and your child is always slow to find their shoes and put them on? 

Does a simple homework task that should have been finished by dinner drag on for the whole evening?

Does your child panic in timed tasks and spend more time watching the clock than doing the task?

All of these could be signs of slow processing.  It is not that the child can't do the task they just can't do it quickly.

Children with slow processing are often misunderstood and their real difficulties overlooked. Often their slowness is misinterpreted for not knowing or not being very bright. Many teachers still equate speed with brightness. They will regard the children who give the quickest answers as the brightest in the class.  In doing this they overlook the fact that many deep thinkers do so slowly. Many bright and gifted children are misjudged and given inappropriate work because teachers can not see past their slowness. They may not be given extension work because they do not complete routine tasks well in the time given.

Maths, in particular, is an area where the teacher's desire for quick answers is misguided. Of course we want children to be familiar with their number bonds and time tables and not have count and calculate every time they need them. However not being able to give an immediate answer does not mean the a child does not know their number facts. Maths has many facets and we want to develop reasoning and problem solving skills as well a calculation skills. Those who are quick at maths may not be the best mathematicians. My son has known his times tables since he was 5 and learnt them almost instantly. However if he is put on the spot and asked a times table question there will always be a time delay. If you judged his maths ability on this you would completely miss his deep understanding of maths and ability to make links between concepts and solve complex problems.

In writing tasks teachers often seem to value speed above content. If two children complete a task to a similar standard the teacher is likely to praise the child who finished first.  A child with slow processing may have written an excellent start to a story but the fact they have not finished their story will always be a problem. Sometimes the teacher will barely acknowledge the quality and effort that has gone into the writing they have done but just focus on the fact it is not finished. The child may also be wrongly accused of being lazy and not trying hard enough. Part of the problem is that the school day is divided in 30 minute to 1 hour slots and a certain amount of content has to be covered in each lesson. Teachers are constantly under pressure to cover the curriculum and this leaves little scope for extending a lesson and allowing more time for tasks when a student needs it.

So what is slow processing and how should we be supporting these learners?
For those familiar with IQ testing, processing speed is one of the 4 areas tested alongside verbal skills, non-verbal or visual perception and working memory. It is an important aspect of the child's learning profile and explains how a child may approach school work and everyday tasks. However it seems to be an area people know little about. Processing speed is the speed at which we can take in information presented visually or verbally and make sense of it or use it.  It is not related to overall intelligence.  It is perfectly possible to have high verbal or perceptual reasoning score but a low processing score.  Slow processing can be part of a learning difficulty like dyslexia, ADHD or auditory processing disorder. There are 3 aspects of processing - visual processing, verbal processing and the ability to respond with a quick motor response - child may have difficulty in one area or a combination of these. This can mean a child's response may vary from task to task.  This can be confusing for adults dealing with the child and can lead people to think that there is a lack of effort or motivation from the child. A child can be slow to answer verbal questions even if they know the answer. They may have difficulty with multi-step instructions and tasks, although they could do each step in isolation. They may be slow to complete written assignments particularly if there several parts. They may need to read information more than once before understanding and answering comprehension questions. They may have difficulty taking notes and become overwhelmed if there is too much information given at once.

There is an assumption that when we say something it should be immediately understood and acted upon. We do this a lot as parents and teachers and get frustrated when the child doesn't respond quickly to our instructions or questions.  Similarly when information is presented visually in a textbook, on a poster or on an interactive whiteboard it is assumed that everyone can process and make use of the information quickly and easily.  

Many adults do not realise that a child can struggle to process information at speed, but they may actually have a good understanding if they were given more time. If a child does not respond quickly to something there is an assumption that their understanding shaky or they need more practice. Sometimes a teacher may lower their academic expectations of a child because they think they are struggling with concepts that in fact they understand well.

What can you do to help?

If you are concerned about your child's processing speed you should seek professional help from an Educational Psychologist who can carry out an educational evaluation.  This will help everyone to understand your child's strengths and weaknesses better.

Make sure the teachers are aware if your child has slow processing speed and openly discuss what allowances can be made.

At School - advice for teachers
Allow more time to answer verbal questions - either ask the question and say that you will come back to the child in a few minutes or ask the question but then avoid direct eye contact or looking impatient while they are formulating their answer. If necessary check a child's understanding privately when the rest of the class are not listening.

Break tasks into small achievable steps and give praise when each part is completed. For example ask the child to complete the opening paragraph of the story rather than the whole story. Alternatively scribe for the child to quickly get down their ideas and then ask them to focus on the end of the story. Value the quality of the work rather than the quantity.

Avoid 'busy' pages of information and questions. Cut them up and present one part at a time. Provide a paper copy of any information displayed on the board.

Use checklists to show the steps involved in a longer writing task or maths questions.

Allow time for children to re-read texts before answering questions and encourage then to do so.

When possible avoid using timers, or time a task without drawing attention to it.

Set a realistic target for the child to complete in a lesson rather than letting them feel they have not finished or have failed.

Whenever possible allow extra time for tasks. Allow the child to complete one task while other children complete two.

Continue to present tasks that match their actual ability. For example let the child complete the most challenging parts of the lesson first, don't always keep the extension tasks for those who have finished the initial task.

At home - advice for parents
Plan out with your child how and when homework tasks will be completed. Allow at least double the time you think is necessary for each step.

Occasionally practice timed tasks but make the task fully achievable in the time given. Set a small target and slowly increase over weeks and months.

When going out make sure your child knows what they are expected to do before leaving. Ask them to repeat back to you what they need to do and prompt them in plenty of time to get ready. Provide visual checklists if necessary.

Talk to your child openly about their difficulties and reassure them that they can get things done and are capable they just have to give themselves enough time. Encourage your child discuss any frustrations at school and follow up with the class teacher if appropriate.

Draw attention to what they are good at and give examples of tasks that are better done slowly and carefully.  Discuss jobs that require a slow and careful approach.

Dyslexic but everyone is different

While there are key characteristics of dyslexia, every person with dyslexia has a slightly different cluster of difficulties.  This is why individual intervention and support is most effective.

Anyone who works with dyslexic students or parents who have more than one child with dyslexia will tell you that there are different types of dyslexia.  While cumulative, systematic multi-sensory teaching benefits all dyslexic students, there are different materials and approaches which can be used depending on the type of dyslexia.  In any intervention, it makes sense to utilise a child’s strengths and work on improving areas of weakness.

Different websites and authors explain these differences in their own way and use different terminology. Some choose to split the main areas of difficulty while others group certain difficulties together. This can be confusing and is perhaps unnecessarily complicated.  Nessy.com have an ebook that lists different types of difficulties and explains how each person with dyslexia has a different combination.  Other websites mention 4, 7 or even 12 types of dyslexia.

In essence, there are 3 main types of dyslexia.   Nearly all dyslexics struggle with working memory however some have more visual perceptual difficulties and some have more auditory processing difficulties and some have equal difficulties in both areas. In addition, all of these groups may have slow processing (this may be identified as rapid naming deficit) and motor skills difficulties (this may include dysgraphia or dyspraxia).

1.    Those dyslexics who have more difficulty with processing auditory information but have strong visual skills have dysphonetic dyslexia (it is also called phonological dyslexia.) This group also includes double deficit dyslexia which is children with difficulties with phonological awareness and rapid naming. 

These are the children who muddle words that sound similar like ‘bag’ and ‘back’ or ‘rag’and ‘rug’. They will have trouble identifying all the sounds in a word when they try to segment a word for spelling. They will try to use their visual memory and could spell chased as ‘cashed’ or farmer as ‘framer’. They often miss sounds or syllables or suffixes from longer words like ‘epty’ for empty, 'swim' for swimming.  These children will have trouble reading names or sounding out polysyllabic words. They can often say the sounds in a word but have trouble blending them together and they may swap over the order of the letters.

When the child starts to learn to read they may initially do quite well as they use their strong visual skills to learn key sight vocabulary and use picture cues to decipher simple texts. However, their decoding skills do not develop in the same way.  If the school uses a scheme that is based on introducing sight vocabulary a little at a time, with predictable sentence structure like Oxford Reading Tree then the child will appear to be learning read. However, as texts become more varied, complex and less predictable they will have no skills to work out new words. Suddenly, the teacher and/or the parents will realise the child has reading difficulties. If the school uses a phonic based scheme like Read Write Inc then these reading difficulties will be evident earlier.

 

These children benefit from using flip books to generate words families and colour coding letter patterns.

These children also tend to be good at maths as they recognise patterns and so do not rely on working memory for number bonds and times tables. or calculation methods 

 2. Other dyslexics struggle more with visual perception and are said to have dyseidetic dyslexia (this may also be called surface dyslexia or visual dyslexia.) These children often struggle with Maths as well as reading and writing. They find it hard to visualise maths concepts and develop a concept of number. They do not notice visual patterns and rely on their weak working memory skills to try to remember number facts and calculation methods.

These are the children who struggle to learn irregular high frequency which make up so much of our early reading (in more transparent languages these children would have fewer difficulties.) If the school uses a phonic based reading scheme these children will learn to decode simple 3 or 4 letter words but it will be noticeable that they will sound out words again and again. They do not commit words to memory. In their writing, high frequency words are spelt phonetically like ‘becos’ and ‘sed’ and they may reverse letters and words. They may also substitute visually similar letters like i and j or t and f. These difficulties are considered normal in the early stages of writing. However, as other children begin to master letter formation and key vocabulary these errors will persist. 

These children need to make words with magnetic letters and play games with these words. Verbalising what is tricky about a word is helpful in learning spellings, as are mnemonics.

 3. Some dyslexics have both visual and auditory difficulties.  These tend to be the child who are noticed early on and are most readily identified as dyslexic by teachers and parents. They struggle to develop reading and writing skills at all in a normal school context as they cannot use stronger skills to compensate. It is vital that these children receive structured, culmulative, multisensory support as soon as possible to overcome their difficulties. Lots of hands on and interactive activities are needed to make words memorable.

How to Learn Spellings

One of the reasons that many children struggle to learn spellings or use the words in their own writing is that their learning is PASSIVE rather than ACTIVE.

Copying a word 3 times as many children are expected to do when they make spelling error in their own work is a passive activity.  Often the child is barely thinking about the word but merely copying a string of letters. The same can be true when learning a list of words with the same letter pattern. Children will remember all the words have 'ai' for example and then passively write each word in the list just remembering to put an 'ai' in the middle and not really thinking about the words. The result is when asked to write the word 'brain' in a sentence in class they will not recall it is an 'ai' word and spell it 'bran'

While words with the same letter pattern should be learnt together more needs to be done if a child it really going to know a pattern and use it for themselves. Excellent phonic programmes like Read, Write, Inc do a lot to encourage children to actively learn and use new letter patterns, children both blend and segment words with a particular letter pattern. Units of Sound computer program and Alpha to Omega also make these letter patterns explicit and ensure plenty of ACTIVE practice.

For a child to remember spellings they need to INTERACT with the words. Magnetic letters are great for encouraging this interaction particularly at home. When learning spellings at home say the word aloud and ask your child to count the sounds in word with their fingers (not the number of letters). For example 'dish' - d-i-sh, 3 sounds, 3 fingers. Then encourage the child to pick out the letters to match each sound. When 2 letters make one sound prompting may be needed - which 2 letters make the 'sh' sound.  If the child is unsure give them a choice rather than telling them.  For further practice, the letters can then be muddled up and the children can put the letters in order again. Alternatively, a letter can be taken away and the child can think of which one is missing.  Once they have practiced several times with magnetic letters, the child can practice writing the word, saying the sounds as they do so.  Writing practice can be done in a variety of ways by using a sand or salt tray, air writing - big and small, using white boards and gel boards.  Finally the words should be used in a sentence, a dictation sentence containing only words the child can already confidently spell with one new word works best. Alpha to Omega student book can be a very useful source of word lists and sentences. Children should expected to mark their spellings themselves, this requires further interaction with the word and encourages the child to look carefully at the letter sequence.

The importance of the Early Years

Many people do not realise how crucial the early years are in determining a child's future development.

Professor Allan Schore of UCLA has found that eighty percent of the brain cells that a person will ever have are manufactured during the first 2 years of life. Brain scans of children who have been neglected compared to a 'typical' child show huge differences in the size of the brain. The interaction between the child and their main care givers at this time is crucial. The neuro pathways on which further learning is based are being laid down from 0 to 2, the foundations for language development, coordination, motor skills, visual skills, listening skills and focus are all being put in place.

It is not about 'hot housing' children or forcing them to do activities they are not ready for but being aware that play and interaction are important right from the start.


If you observe and interact with a group of pre-school children of 3 - 4  years of age the difference in the range of skills some children have compared to others is already huge.

Much as many people hate to say it, the advantage some children have at this stage will stay with them all throughout school.   The differences between children are partly genetic and partly due to their environment.  Of course nothing is straightforward, children all develop at different rates.  Some children are 'late bloomers' and some children have learning difficulties and developmental issues to deal with.  But stimulating and interacting with our baby and toddler will always make a difference to their later skills and ability to learn.

If you take a typical nursery or kindergarten class and ranked them in terms of language development, motor skills, focus and readiness to learn.  Then you looked at the attainment in reading and maths for the same group of children at the end of primary school at 11 years old you would find the order is pretty much the same.  It is not to say that schools and parents do not make any difference but they can only build on the foundation that is already there.

The purpose of this article is not make any one feel bad about their child or their parenting but just to raise the awareness that those first 2 years can make a real difference.  Many parents are unaware of what they can do to encourage and nurture their child at this early stage.  Many educators and parents are increasingly concerned about range and level of skills of children coming into school. But the answer is not to do more in pre-school or bring educational goals lower and lower.  The answer is in supporting parents and other caregivers and their children before pre-school.

So what can we do?

Many people still think that a quiet baby is a good baby and while we can not change a child's temperament we can encourage all children to interact and respond to their environment.

1. Talk
Talking to your baby as much as possible is important for future language development.  Some people think that because the baby can not understand you, that it is not important to talk to them. But the baby can pick up on the rhythm and sound patterns right from the beginning.  They recognise tone of voice, they recognise their care giver/s voice/s above others.  It is also not necessary to use baby talk, if you use the correct words you will find that when a child is ready to talk they will use these words too. Reading and sharing books right from the beginning is also a great way to introduce children to a whole range of vocabulary and the world beyond their own experience. Most children it love too!

2. Movement and curiosity
Encouraging your baby to reach for objects and touch things is also important. Let them have plenty of time out of their pram or cot to explore what is around them. Let them look at and touch everyday objects (as long as it is safe). We don't need fancy toys; as we all know at Christmas, when the baby or toddler plays with the box as much as the toy inside!  Encourage curiosity as much as possible, let your baby or child watch you do all the everyday things that need to be done - cooking, cleaning, shopping.  Lying on their tummy for some time each day, as well as their back helps to strengthen muscles and helps later coordination.  When they are ready to crawl let them go and explore, try not to contain them much as practical.  Babies experience to world through all their senses and we should encourage this as much as possible.

3. Play
Play, play and more play! Play is how we are meant to learn the boundaries of our environment and ourselves. It is how we learn cause and effect, how we learn to problem solve and focus.  Many of the 'traditional' toys are best - building blocks, shape sorters, jigsaws, matching games. We also want a balance between adult directed play and child directed play.  We don't always need to show a child how to do something 'properly' they can learn a lot by playing with a toy or game the 'wrong' way and then working out what to do.  Messy play with water, mud, sand or paint are all fun and hugely beneficial.

'Play' is currently a hot topic terms of pre-school, school curriculum and education but the point is play is important right from the beginning.

See https://www.zerotothree.org/espanol/brain-development video clips and great practical tips.

Also take a look at https://www.education.com/reference/article/infants-toddlers-ages-zero-two/  for further reading on early development.