Understanding the challenges that come from being neurodiverse that can affect collating research
When supporting students with dyslexia and other related neurodiverse ways of thinking, often some of the challenges that students experience do not always seem that ‘dyslexic’ but can fundamentally affect a student’s ability to collate research.
Many people will think about dyslexia being a condition that affects reading and writing but it affects so much more than that for some people. There is no common experience of dyslexia but it is important to be aware of how it could affect a student.
In this article we share some insights about dyslexia that may help with understanding why collating research, for a student with this condition, may be difficult.
Organisational Skills
For some with dyslexia, it can be difficult to remember important information or judge how long a task might take. Both of these issues can directly affect the task of collating research. The task may seem open-ended and overwhelming and take longer, especially if key information is not collated in an easily accessible format.
Tiredness
People with dyslexia often work harder and for longer in order to catch up and get their work done. It is very common for students with dyslexia to be incredibly tired.
Fatigue can, for some people, make the ‘symptoms’ of dyslexia seem worse and so affect organisational and memory capabilities.
Concentration
Neurodiverse brains can sometimes find it hard to process different stimuli at the same time as well as have the ability to productively switch between different tasks. Having a strategy that empowers the student to streamline their cognitive capabilities, so that nothing gets lost when collating research, is essential in terms of recall and delivering on greater pieces of work such as dissertations.
One strategy for supporting a productive approach to collating research.
At Aventido, we have been working with our friends at Pro-Study to help neurodiverse students with collating research in a way that builds confidence and makes it easy to find and cite key sources for dissertations and essays.
The video below explains how Pro-Study works:
Sam Cock
Sam joined team Aventido at the start of 2020. Sam has worked within the DSA for over 8 years and is also an AT trainer creating personal training sessions tailored to the specific needs of his students that allows them to enhance their study skills and ability to complete tasks.
Sam’s deep knowledge of AT solutions and strong student relationships provides him with the skills to showcase the products in a way the clearly shows the benefits AT can have on the users learning experience.
Over the last year Sam has been creating a wide range of webinars involving two of our partners here at Aventido: Pro-Study and Nuance.
As well as curating webinars you will probably catch Sam representing the company at industry conferences and road shows giving presentations and 1-2-1 product awareness sessions.