The Fallacy of “Practice Makes Perfect” – When Skill Isn’t the Issue with Reading Difficulties 

Practice makes perfect, right? When a child avoids reading, loses their place while reading, has poor handwriting, or is clumsy, we do what our parents did with us: we help them practice more so they can become proficient in everything they do. 

There’s just one problem with this approach: often, the shortfall doesn’t lie in their lack of knowledge or skills; it resides in fundamental processing deficits unrelated to talent, attitude, or other factors we might readily suspect. 

Does your child experience any of the following symptoms? 

• Avoids reading
• Moves head from side to side while reading
• Uses finger to guide while reading
• Skips sentences or lines
• Re-reads words or entire sentences
• Reverses words
• Disregards punctuation

These are just a few signs that your child may be experiencing eye-tracking issues. Reading more will not correct this condition and may drive your child further away from wanting to read. In this case, practice does not make perfect. 

Eye Tracking in Simple Terms

Fluent reading is a process of temporarily fixating on a word or group of words just long enough to process their meaning, seeing the next word(s) in our peripheral vision, moving our eyes to focus on those words, fixating briefly to process them, and so on. When our eyes track as they are designed to, this process is fluid, resulting in fast reading speeds, good comprehension, and a pleasant reading experience. 

Poor eye-tracking function is relatively common. Twenty-five percent of students experience vision-related issues that hinder their reading and learning abilities. Many of these cases involve sub-par eye tracking. Some 30% of people diagnosed with dyslexia have some degree of eye-tracking deficits. These shortfalls hinder the effects of tutoring or other corrective efforts. Until identified and appropriately addressed, eye-tracking issues will keep a person from reading and learning at their full capacity. 

Beyond Reading

While eye tracking is key to successful reading, it is also at the core of many other daily activities, including playing sports (tracking a ball or people in motion), following the movements of objects on a screen (such as characters in video games), or accomplishing physical tasks that involve movement and coordination. Proper eye tracking is vital to our overall performance and success. 

Hurdles to Identifying Eye-Tracking Deficits

Without specialized training and equipment, eye-tracking deficits are not readily identifiable. Some of the hurdles to properly diagnosing eye-tracking issues include: 

• The fact such problems cannot be identified by simply observing the child,
• Children assuming their visual experiences are the same as everyone else’s,
• General care optometrists’ routine exams lacking tests for eye-movement disorders, and
• Confusion surrounding the meaning of “20/20” as it relates to sight, not vision. (For more on this topic, see our article on Sight vs. Vision.)

Simple, Reliable, Accessible Solutions

The good news is that you and your family are under the care of neuro-developmental optometrists at ACHIEVE Family Vision, not general care optometrists. We provide the most comprehensive sight and vision exams available to make sure we are addressing your family’s overall sight and visual processing health. This assures that your family members’ reading, learning, working, and playing are all supported by healthy organs and neuro-processes that support all these activities and many more. 

If any of your family members or friends’ family members are experiencing any of the challenges mentioned in this article, we welcome the opportunity to share our unique, specialized expertise with them. A doctor’s visit at ACHIEVE has been the first step in the life-changing journeys of many of our patients who have searched long and hard for answers to their struggles prior to discovering us. 

A phone call is all it takes to assure you have all the insights you need to make the right decisions for your family members, friends, and other loved ones. You can reach our Patient Care Coordinators at 801-492-6393. 

We’re always here to answer your questions. Thank you for allowing us to serve you! 

We look forward to seeing you soon. 

Dr. Mark Curtis, OD, FCOVD
Dr. Jeremy Gardner, OD, FAAO
Dr. Christopher Pope, OD

Stephanie Cadd

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