Literacy Linked to Eye Health

"In the month after Alexander Dominguez joined Maygon Thompson's third-grade class at Charles Carroll Barrister Elementary School, he breezed through worksheets and quickly rose to be among the most studious members. So when the third-grader couldn't read a relatively simple sentence on the board, Thompson was puzzled. 'I thought he was kidding,' said Thompson, a special educator at the public school in Southwest Baltimore. 'But he's so serious about his work, it had to be something else,'" according to a report in the Baltimore Sun. A team of researchers at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital might have figured out that 'something else.' They're trying to answer a basic but overlooked question: Are students struggling to read because they can't see? For the past six months, Hopkins pediatric ophthalmologist Dr. Megan Collins has been conducting screenings and administering glasses to students in a dozen Baltimore elementary schools to produce a first-of-its-kind study that attempts to link vision deficiencies and literacy in a school-based population. Whether students can't read because they can't see, Collins said, is one of those 'important research questions you think someone else has answered.'" Read more.