How Weak Cognitive Skills Cause Reading Struggles
You sit down with your child and teach reading, or they come home from school and you are excited to practice their newly-learned skill… and it’s crickets. There is no confidence, no fluency, and your child’s reading struggles frustrate them (and maybe you too, if we’re being honest).
Reading struggles are hard to navigate. After all, the way school teaches reading either works or it doesn’t—and as a homeschooler, navigating different curricula and strategies can be exhausting.
Watch: 5 Facts About Reading and Why Reading Programs Fail
So What Do You Do to Approach Reading Struggles?
Instead of trying more of the same or hiring more tutors, what if you could get to the root cause of WHY your child is struggling in the first place?
Tutoring and remedial reading interventions often approach the symptom—reading struggles—but neglect the cause: weak cognitive skills.
Every part of learning is governed by a set of cognitive skills that range from attention (can you take in information) to memory (how do you use or store it). Between these, there are many different unique skills that determine what happens to information. For many struggling readers, there is more than one skill weakness that is holding them back from success.
Below are some of the cognitive skills we look at when it comes to reading struggles, but you should know that every situation is unique. There are limitless possibilities for the range of skill levels, and we work with your family to uncover what’s causing your child’s struggles and how you can break through!
How Each Cognitive Skill Impacts Reading:
Attention
If your child struggles to sit still in school, is distracted by the smallest things, or struggles to keep their focus for any length of time, it’s a sign of weak attention. For reading, this can mean constantly zoning out, having to stop and restart, or not even having the mental bandwidth to put forth effort.
Working Memory
This is your brain’s immediate “bucket” for learning. When you take in information, what happens? Is it in one ear and out the other? Or are you able to hold onto it long enough to put it to use?
Weak working memory is a primary cause of ADHD-like symptoms, and for kids who struggle with reading, working memory is especially important. Common reading struggles for kids with low working memory include:
- Forgetting what they had just read (so they are constantly going back and re-reading or just not understanding the text at all)
- Trouble with segmenting, blending, or decoding longer words
- Figuring out a word and then not remembering it the next time it shows up (even if it’s just a sentence or 2 later)
- Lack of comprehension and motivation for reading
Processing Speed
This is just what it sounds like: how fast your brain can take in and use information. Thinking quickly while reading is a vital tool for reading comprehension. Not only does your brain have to quickly take in what the word says, it has to apply meaning and build a visual image to help you comprehend it. For many students with low processing speed, reading struggles look like:
- Lack of fluency (frequent stops and starts)
- Trouble decoding new words
- Poor reading comprehension
Logic & Reasoning
Your brain’s ability to problem-solve, reach conclusions, and logically process situations greatly impacts your ability to read. Reading struggles rooted in low logic & reasoning may look like:
- Not being able to figure out a word based on pictures or context
- Struggling to understand basic phonics, reading, or spelling rules and when to apply them
- Having trouble figuring out new words (but still managing with sight words or familiar texts)
- Being a “guesser” instead of trying to figure out what the words actually say
If your child has low logic & reasoning, they will also likely struggle with math or other subject areas that require problem-solving and planning skills.
Visual Processing
Visual processing is your brain’s ability to take in visual stimuli and interpret and manipulate it. If your child struggles visually, their reading struggles may look like frequently misreading letters or words that look similar, struggling to visually track along a line of text, or getting overwhelmed by too much text (because they can’t visually select where to focus).
Long-Term Memory
Can your child remember a word that they have read before and recognize both its phonetic sounds and its meaning? Weak long-term memory puts a hiccup in this process, making both reading in general and comprehension harder.
Auditory Processing
This is the key skill for reading! Virtually every student who struggles with reading has low auditory processing skills because they are unable to efficiently manipulate, blend, segment, and decode new words. Some of the biggest signs of auditory processing causing reading struggles include:
- Inability to blend a word based on its sounds
- Trouble with rhyming, identifying first/last/middle sounds, and other sound recognition tasks
- Poor reading fluency with constant stops to re-sound-out even familiar words
- Struggling with reading comprehension
What won’t help your struggling reader: waiting it out
The longer you wait for reading to “click,” the farther behind your struggling reader may fall. If there is a cognitive skill weakness, it is not just going to get better with time. Targeted strengthening of these essential skills for reading is the best way to help your child make up ground and succeed with reading!
Click here to learn more about our approach to helping struggling readers!
