It takes the tenacity of a parent to do whatever is necessary to support a struggling child; it took the tenacity of two such parents to move the issue of dyslexia to the forefront of the United States Congress.  Representatives Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) and Pete Stark (D-CA), both parents of students with dyslexia, are proposing a bipartisan dyslexia congressional caucus to bring about awareness of dyslexia and the challenges, opportunities, and issues that must be addressed to eliminate the barriers to success for students with dyslexia.  Read More.

A recent study from the University of Padua, in Italy, argues that problems in visual attention may underline the difficulties that children with dyslexia have in learning to read.  The researchers administered measures of visual spatial attention, speech-sound processing, and rapid color naming to kindergarten children (age 5, prior to formal reading instruction), and followed them for two years as they learned to read. Good and poor readers were identified in first and second grades. The results showed that children's performance on visual spatial attention measured in kindergarten uniquely predicted their reading abilities in first and second grades. Read More.