<p>My daughter did very well in high school and goes to a very good university. I have always thought she had some kind of (verbal or visual) processing problem, that she has managed to overcome throughout her school years. We had her tested in 11th grade, but they did not find any indication of disability. She works very hard and does brilliantly in math and science, but grammar and reading have always been a struggle.</p>
<p>She sometimes mixes up p’s, d’s and b’s when writing, which I always thought was strange. She also, during conversation, mixes up before/after, tomorrow/yesterday and things like that. It’s nothing severe, but she is working and studying like crazy now that she’s in college and manages to get barely average grades, and she’s becoming frustrated. </p>
<p>Does this sound like it could be some type of mild form of dyslexia, or am I being ridiculous, and it’s just a case of adjusting to college level work? (Although she was an IB student, and I thought that would have prepared her well.) Something just doesn’t seem to add up (again).</p>
<p>Hmmm… one of the symptoms of dyslexia I’ve heard of is “directional confusion,” which sounds a lot like the confusion between b, d, and p (and q). Another is “sequencing” confusion, though that relates more directly to the formation of syllables and spelled words than temporal issues. </p>
<p>I have no first-hand experience with dyslexia, but I’ve known several people who dealt with it. One of the things I did notice about these individuals is that they often had a lot of difficulty retaining things they read. That, too, is an “official” symptom of dyslexia. </p>
<p>I am not sure of the support available to such students at the university level among those who have yet to be diagnosed. Is there a place she can go to get evaluated on her own?</p>
<p>JustAMom - I think your daughter and my daughter are at the same school. If it makes you feel any better, my daughter is also studying like crazy. Last year her best friend was really struggling, but this year it is all coming together for her. If your daughter is getting median grade, it could be a B or B+. I would get her checked, but it could be that college is just a lot harder than HS.</p>
<p>I do some of those things. I’m very unreliable with right/left, get confused with backwards/forwards (in respect to time, particularly), mix up the order of letters in words when I’m writing, etc. If she was only tested two years ago and things came out fine, then I’m guessing you’d see the same result. If it’s free or inexpensive for her to get tested in college, then she can certainly see how it goes. If may be that college work is simply more demanding than what she’s used to. It’s probably worth looking into where her problems fall (time on tests, simplistic theses in essays, not understanding concepts, etc.). I know that my college has free sessions on study habits, speed reading, handling academic stress, and things like that. She may want to look into whether her college has anything similar.</p>
<p>Thanks again everyone! Oldfort, thanks for the reply. I do think that it just might be that the work in college is much harder, but she was in the most challenging program in high school, and I would have thought that would have helped prepare her a bit. The thing that concerns me most, however, is the the lack of self esteem from feeling “not smart” because of her issues with reading comprehension and poor writing ability, and the fact that she truly knows the answers from her hours and hours of studying, but because of time constraints on tests, she cannot efficiently process the questions to allow her to develop the correct answers at test time. Since she was in 4th or 5th grade I have thought that she has had some kind of processing problem, but after an initial period of adjustment, she has always seemed to work it out. I don’t know…I’m confused. It’s just that with the occasional letter direction confusion and the sequencing issues she has, I can’t help but think that there is something else going on. She never wants to “make excuses” for any grades she gets, and says that “she only switches the letters or uses the wrong word when she is not concentrating”, but how many people need to concentrate to write a “d” instead of a “b”, or use the word “before” when they really mean “after”. It must be exhausting to have to think about that.</p>
<p>Hi there, I realize this thread is four months old, but I do hope your daughter looked into being tested for dyslexia. The two symptoms you mention, letter/number reversals and word retrieval issues, are both warning signs for dyslexia.</p>