Current research shows that about 20% of school-aged children have undetected vision problems which are hindering their school performance. Many of these children have passed their school’s vision screening, which is only designed to check children’s distance sight or acuity as measured by the 20/20 line on the eye chart. 
Unfortunately, school screenings aren’t equipped to check for other important visual skills, especially skills children use for close-up activities such as reading. For example, school screenings don’t check to see if children can coordinate both their eyes as a team, track print across a written page without losing their place, or comfortably adjust focus when looking from near to far. Children can have 20/20 eyesight and still have vision problems in other areas.
Children who are struggling with undetected vision problems often fail to progress well in school. The following is a checklist of symptoms that may signal a vision problem that may be related to your child’s learning progress. If 5 or more of these apply to your child, then a comprehensive binocular vision evaluation by our office is indicated.
Checklist of Common Symptoms
Children with vision-based learning problems may have the following difficulties:
- Headaches with reading or writing
- Words slide together or get blurry when reading
- Reads below grade level
- Loses place while reading
- Head tilt or closes an eye when reading
- Hard to copy from the board
- Doesn’t like reading or writing
- Leaves out small words when reading
- Hard to write in a straight line
- Burning, itching, or watery eyes
- Hard to understand what has been read
- Holds book very close
- Hard to pay attention when reading
- Hard to finish assignments of time
- Gives up easily (says “I can’t” before trying)
- Bumps into things, knocks things over
- Homework takes too long
- Daydreams in class
- In trouble for being off task at school