Impact of Dyslexia on the WISC-IV Working Memory Scores
By Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, Ph.D
Q:
My 8 years old daughter has been diagnosed with moderate dyslexia. The
Psychologist also gave her the WISC-IV IQ Test. The results are IQ Score of
103. However the Psychologist says this score is somewhat misleading as her
Working Memory Score was only 6th centile while others ranged from 60th to
90th centile and therefore dragged her overall score down.
Therefore, because of this she suspects my daughter has severe dyslexia
due to the vast discrepancy in scores. In your opinion, is this true. I will
be getting her reassessed in one year's time in order to continue the
support she needs. Thank you for time.
A:
There are some details missing here which makes it slightly hard to
pinpoint the problem. When was she diagnosed and what was used to
diagnose her condition? Upon diagnosis, did your daughter go through any
treatment? If treatment is taken for a while now, she should show some
improvements. However, being labeled moderately dyslexic and severely
dyslexic would impact the scores.
The 6 percentile score on Working Memory is definitely a concern as her
other scores differ vastly. Briefly, working memory is our ability to
store and manipulate information for a short period. This is measured by
dual-tasks, where the individual has to remember an item while
simultaneously processing unrelated pieces of information. A widely used
working memory task is the reading span task where the individual reads
a sentence, verifies it, and then recalls the final word. Individual
differences in working memory performance are closely related to a range
of academic skills such as reading, spelling, comprehension, and
mathematics.
It is possible that the vast discrepancy in scores points out to rather
severe dyslexia. However, there are some documented drawbacks with the
WISC in assessing working memory. The WISC relies heavily reliance on
verbal information. This makes it possible that a student who has
particular problems in handling verbal information mentally may perform
at low levels on such tests. This is simply because of the format of the
material - and not because of working memory problems. Therefore, for
these children, even though they have substantial working memory
problems, they are probably secondary rather than primary in nature, and
they also have working memory strengths that would be undetected by
administration of the WISC-IV. Check this possibility with your
psychologist.
In any case, a new training program for children with dyslexic that has
proven results is the Jungle Memory brain training (you can get further
information on this by doing a search on Jungle memory). It is believed
to help working memory and increase IQ. I have not had anyone tried this
so I am not able to comment further. Do get he assessed further to rule
out any other learning problem. All the best!
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