Presented at LILAC 2022

1. Dyslexia, Creativity and
Information-Seeking
Lynne Beveridge
PhD Supervisors: Dr. Andrew MacFarlane and Dr. Stephann Makri
Lynne.Beveridge@city.ac.uk
Twitter: @lynneybeveridge

2. Workshop structure
■What do we know about dyslexia?
■Participants’ experiences of information-seeking
■Barriers and workarounds to information-seeking
■Reflection on current practices
■Sharing ideas; should we adapt teaching content
and practices?

3. What do we know about dyslexia?

4. • reading (BDA, 2022)
• “processing and remembering
information” (BDA, 2022)
• “organisational skills” (BDA, 2022)
• learning vocabulary (Snowling, 2000)
• recall of vocabulary (Snowling, 2000)
• It is best thought of as a
continuum, not a distinct category,
and there are no clear cut-off
points” (Rose, 2009)
• “neurobiological in origin”
(IDA, 2002)
• “It's estimated up to 1 in every 10
people in the UK has some
degree of dyslexia” (NHS, 2018)

5. • “strengths in areas such as
reasoning and in visual and creative
fields” (BDA, 2022)
• “good…creative thinking
and problem solving”
(NHS, 2018)
• Lower self-efficacy than
undergraduate peers (Stagg,
Eaton and Sjoblom, 2018)

6. How can dyslexia impact information-seeking?
Participant experiences
■Communicating Information Need with Online Platforms
■Evaluating Online Information (necessary to read and
interpret the online information, then match against
information need)

7. ■ “I’ve had it before…I’ve taken a day to find some information and I’ve tried
multiple different searches, even just put in one word ‘cause I just can’t get the
information I need…I think it’s describing what I want because…it’s getting that
across that I find difficult” (P26)
■ “Which is why I struggle with the word ‘environment’, because…the word
environment for me, I’m just like that means you know, the environment, being
eco-friendly, you know, things like that. And so then, that word, being eco-friendly
doesn’t then fit into the role of the eco-friendly in children’s language
development” (P12)
Communicating Information Need
Selecting Keywords

8. ■ “I wasn’t finding anything, I was
trying to think of other ways I could
word it” (P28)
Communicating Information Need
Selecting Keywords

9. ■ “having fewer words actually brought up
more…I suppose it’s less to go on and
everything was like not what I wanted”
(P10)
Communicating Information Need
Selecting Keywords

10. ■ “when I’m searching and I spell something wrong then I can’t find what I’m looking
for” (P28)
■ “sometimes for like theorist’s names, I’ve not got a chance of spelling that” (P9)
■ “I can tell because well sometimes I think I’ve spelt it right and it says, ‘search not
found’ so I know that it’s not right…in Google it would go ‘did you mean this’
whereas Discovery is like ‘no, no searches’, so you’ve got to try and get the right
spelling” (P10)
Communicating Information Need
Spelling Keywords

11. ■ “I didn’t even look at that…I didn’t even recognise that either” (P12)
Communicating Information Need
Spelling Keywords

12. ■ “reading is a big issue for me” (P23)
■ “I do try and avoid the reading part” (P12)
■ “reading is really difficult because the words literally just fly around the page”
(P20)
■ “just sort of reading, understanding it and actually where I have to follow the lines,
it does take longer, I just can’t skim read” (P23)
■ “I’m concentrating so much on trying to keep my place, it’s like oh I didn’t actually
read it, it didn’t actually go in” (P10)
Evaluating Online Information
Reading Online Information

14. ■ “it just looked a bit too academic…the words, I was like no” (P21)
■ “the way that they word it, it just doesn’t mean anything to me” (P25)
■ “if I don’t understand the first few sentences, I just don’t carry on” (P27)
Evaluating Online Information
Interpreting Online Information

15. Memory
■ “after a while I have to like remember what I
was trying to do” (P21)
■ “then I forget that I’ve used that book and I
don’t go back to it…completely forget, not
remember that I’d read it” (P15)
Evaluating Online Information: a weakened process
Self-Efficacy
■ “I’m not particularly confident…I’m
sort of quite anxious to just sort of to
pick a point and go with it” (P23)
■ “if I’ve got a thought in my head…and
it’s not like matching up to that I’m like
oh well that’s not what I want…even
though it potentially could be” (P22)

16. ■Participant’s creative problem solving:
written on the sheets are ways that participants were trying
workaround the barriers they encountered while information-
seeking

17. ■Pairs activity: what barriers do you think the workarounds
on the sheet could be used for? What might the
disadvantages of these approaches be?
Communicating Information Need Evaluating Online Information
Selecting Keywords Reading Online Information
Spelling Keywords Interpreting Online Information
Memory Memory
Self-efficacy Self-efficacy

18. ■Group activity: using the sheets of barriers
and workarounds, reflect on current information
literacy teaching content and practices
■Sharing of ideas: should we adapt
information literacy teaching content and
practices?
QR Code links to Sharing Wall on Padlet -
https://padlet.com/lynnebeveridge/LILAC22

19. Thank you so much for attending my workshop!
What questions do you have?

20. Lynne Beveridge
City, University of
London
Email:
lynne.beveridge@city.ac.uk
Twitter: @lynneybeveridge

21. City, University of London
Northampton Square
London
EC1V 0HB
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)20 7040 5060
E: department@city.ac.uk
www.city.ac.uk/department
Publications:
Cole, L., MacFarlane, A., and Makri, S. (2020) ‘More than Words: The Impact of
Memory on how Undergraduates with Dyslexia Interact with Information’,
Conference Proceedings CHIIR’20, Vancouver, Canada, 14-18th March 2020
Cole, L., MacFarlane, A., Buchanan, G. (2016) ‘Does dyslexia present barriers
to information literacy in an online environment? A pilot study’, Library and
Information Research, 40 (123) pp.24-56

22. References
• British Dyslexic Association (2022) About Dyslexia Available at: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/dyslexia/about-
dyslexia/what-is-dyslexia Accessed: 08.03.22
• International Dyslexia Association (2002) Definition of Dyslexia Available at: https://dyslexiaida.org/definition-of-dyslexia/
Accessed: 08.03.22
• NHS (2018) Overview. Dyslexia Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/dyslexia/ Accessed: 08.03.22
• Reid, G. (2016) Dyslexia. A Practitioner’s Handbook. London: Wiley
• Rose, J. (2009) Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties Available at:
https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/14790/7/00659-2009DOM-EN_Redacted.pdf Accessed: 08.03.22
• Stagg, S. D., Eaton, E., and Sjoblom, A.M. (2018) ‘Self-efficacy in undergraduate students with dyslexia: a mixed methods
investigation’ British journal of Special Education 45 (1) pp26-42 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12200
• Snowling, M. (2000) Dyslexia 2nd Edition Oxford: Blackwell