Dyslexia among scientists

About 10% of the population are said to have dyslexia. This, according to Sir Jim Rose, who authored the Rose report into the condition in 2009, is “a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.” Importantly, the definition also emphasises that dyslexia occurs across the full range of intellectual abilities. So, is the way we teach, examine and practice science causing us to lose out on the potential contributions of a whole slice of society? Speaking with Chris Smith, Sara Rankin, herself dyslexic and an academic at Imperial College, London, has written a very compelling account of why she thinks this is the case, pointing out, along the way, that until we invented reading and writing, we wouldn’t have even known that dyslexia exists…

Sara - As academics, if you want to be a scientist working in a university, doing research in your lab, and obviously all that research is very practical. You're doing experiments, very exciting, your testing hypotheses, you then have to communicate them. And the way that we communicate is a very formal process, which requires writing a scientific paper. And it has to be written in a very prescriptive way. And one of the things that we're saying in this paper is that if you are somebody that is dyslexic, this may be a challenge for you. And it certainly is for me because we do not do well in terms of text being our sort of mode of communication. We would much prefer to talk or to use much more sort of visual way of communicating. When somebody says to me, "right, just write that down," that's a big problem for me. And if you go back into school, you did science, you understood science, you got excited about science, but then you got into an exam situation where you weren't doing a practical, you were actually having to write an essay on such and such. And writing an essay in terms of assessing somebody's ability to be a scientist, I think is completely missing the point of what being a scientist is about.

Chris - To what extent though, Sara is the horses for courses? I completely get the point you are making. And I completely agree with you. If you're talking about something that you can expound upon in an essay, but maths isn't assessed that way. Physics often isn't assessed that way...

Sara - Okay, so you think it's not being assessed that way. But you look at a GCSE and it is being assessed with a literacy, because what they have decided to do is, to make it more interesting, they create a whole story. Now you have to read a long text. And for us that are dyslexic, we don't want to read all that. We don't care about that. We just wanna get onto the maths or the biology.

Chris - But you've been incredibly articulate in explaining the problem to me and making me completely understand where you are coming from. And, and your command of, of expressive English is extremely powerful. So why not get some software that means you could speak into a Dictaphone and convey your thoughts that way and then have the computer do the actual writing? Because, clearly, if there is a gap for you, it's not in being extremely articulate.

Sara - Yeah. So it's a stylistic thing. I'm used to talking to lots of different audiences. I've spent my whole career being engaged in outreach activities, working with schools, et cetera. So I'm, I'm used to talking at multiple levels, but scientific paper has a very prescriptive way that they want you to write. And every journal is slightly different. It's a psychological thing. I think that we basically have this from school from being told that we're stupid and lazy. 'cause We, we have all these ideas. I can, you know, ideas come out of us just ridiculously, but it's putting things in a two dimensional, linear way. That's my problem.

Chris - Is that the same for everyone with dyslexia? Or is everyone's fishbowl of information swimming around gonna be a bit different? And therefore if we tried to say, okay, we'll do this in a way that suits dyslexics, in fact there is no simple, straightforward, one way that suits dyslexics, it would have a bit different for everybody. Do we just need more flexibility in terms of the way that we allow people to convey their science? Is that what you are arguing for?

Sara - Yes. I'm arguing for more flexibility. So a specific example, I run Masters levels science courses at Imperial and I don't do exams. <Laugh> Students don't have exams! And we offer lots of different types of assessment. Sometimes students will have to write 2000 words, but other times they would have to create an infographic. Other times we would say, "right, make this complicated bit of science, how are you going to engage patients or primary school kids with this to, to get them some understanding of this complicated bit of science." And what we really want to assess is not knowledge recall. We want to assess the ability to utilise knowledge, to innovate with knowledge.

Chris - How much talent are we losing out on exploiting through the rigid way we're operating at the moment, then, do you think?

Sara - Well, what we can see, if we just look at GCSE level, these are the exams you do when you are 16. At that point, 10% of the students will have something like dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism. Some of them might not have an official diagnosis. And we know there's a huge attainment gap at that point. And nowadays, if you get a B, you are not allowed to go on to do A level in many schools. So if you're not allowed to go and do the science A level because you get a B, you are losing those people. And we know that only 3% of students at A level have a specific learning difference. And that is compared with the, the numbers in the general population, which is between 15 and 20%.

Chris - So there's potentially a, a huge dropout, attrition driven by the system you're arguing. Yes. Where do the people who leave go then, what do they end up doing? These potentially gifted people who could make a valid contribution to science, technology, engineering, maths? Where do they go instead?

Sara - Well, for example, the Royal College of Art, which is around the corner from Imperial, 49% of their students have specific learning differences. There's a huge concentration within the arts. And that's because within the arts you can get into art college with a portfolio, you can do a foundation course, you can get a portfolio of work. So a lot of these students end up in creative industries, likewise in architecture. And that's thought to be because people that are dyslexic are very good at this sort of 3D understanding of the world.