Eyeglasses for school kids boost academic performance, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Eyeglasses for school kids boost academic performance, study finds

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This study finds that eyeglasses for school kids with vision impairment help.

Just from the title I wondered if school kids with eyeglasses performed better than school kids without eyeglasses (and whether eyeglasses gave some self-confidence, or if vision impairment somehow made affected kids more studious, or some shit like this). I was surprised. It's not that. The actual result presented by this article seems far less surprising to me (still interesting even if my first reaction was well, duh - some studies are here to turn "well, duh"'s into actual knowledge).

I suggest changing the title to "Eyeglasses for impaired school kids boost academic performance, study finds" (and even dropping "study finds")

My mom was called stupid her entire first school years until somebody thought to test her eyes.

I somehow slipped through the UK eye-test system with -5 astigmatism until the age of 12.

I was 12 when I first saw a leaf on a tree.

wow the system really dropped the ball on this one

Supremely curious: as a 12 y/o, did you assume everyone struggled getting around, always?

Yep!

I had an eyetest in primary school, I couldn't read anything. Looking back on it years later I assume she thought I was joking or else just royally cocked-up!

It left me with some strange cognitive coping strategies - like I would always dictate what the teacher was saying rather than reading it off the board.

The offshoot is I have very poorly formatted but fast handwriting!

That's funny, I didn't have nearly as bad eye sight, but also distinctly remember first noticing leaves on trees when I got my glasses around that same age.

I think I assumed everyone saw trees as they're commonly drawn and painted: as just a blob of green

I remember that first "OMG people can see things further than 20 feet away!?!" revelation.

I failed high school algebra largely because I lost my glasses and was just trying to imagine in my head what the teacher was talking about. The adults in my life knew I had a prescription, and had the money to pay for them and yet nobody did anything. The bystander effect is truly bizarre.

> whether eyeglasses gave some self-confidence, or if vision impairment somehow made affected kids more studious, or some shit like this

Being studious causes vision impairment. We noticed that a long, long time ago.

I don’t know, there could be all sorts of confounders there. Like maybe poor eyesight means you’re not as good at sports which means you tend to focus on more studious hobbies like reading.

Or maybe reading and spending time inside tends to ruin your eyesight. Or maybe it does, but only because it takes time away from active pursuits like sports!

Does anyone have pointers to research that teases out the causes and effects here?

https://www.nature.com/articles/519276a

This is a nice summary.

https://www.nature.com/articles/519276a

It's less being studious, and more that being studious tends to be correlated with spending time indoors more. It's the spending time indoors that causes it apparently.

> It's the spending time indoors that causes it apparently.

Not quite. It’s the lack of spending time outdoors.

Mixed together with (sometimes purposely) neglect of body and lots of reading small text with bad light conditions.

actually it's only the light part. recent studies from South Korea and Australia find, that lack of light exposure causes vision impairment

Not only that. It really helps your eyes to look at other things and more importantly, at things at different distance.

Plenty of studies for that, too.

(not strictly for "outside" though, you can also look out of the window regulary, it is so that your eyes refocus and relax )

Do you have a source? Everything I've read gave me the impression that we only have strong evidence that outdoor time is a factor, and the light exposure explanation is just a hypothesis.

I only realized I needed glasses at 16 (and only started at 17), who knows how long I've been complaining the whiteboard markers are done and needed to be replaced. it's like living with gaussian blur filter.

I discovered mine at 13 when we went on vacation and I said "wow, the TV reception is bad here".

It was fine; our TV at home was just a lot closer.

Unfortunately, there are large groups of people who will say things like "why help poor kids get glasses". Studies like these allow someone to put "$N in leads to $M out, M > N" equations in place to justify it.

Who says that?

I assume you're asking who needs numbers relating to academic performance to justify helping poor kids? I don't know if you missed US politics from 2017-2021, but the President's Budget Chief (and later Chief of Staff) (Mick Mulvaney) said “[the US government feeding poor kids is] supposed to help kids who don’t get fed at home so they do better in school, Guess what? There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually doing that. There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually helping results, helping kids do better in school.”

Then he proposed cutting the budget for school lunches. The Secretary in charge also did a number on those programs.

I agree with the title change. It's quite misleading, especially if they are referring to the kids who have vision impairment.

When you first need glasses it can surprise you. Towards the end of my uni days I got an eye test after just assuming nothing was wrong for several months. That first set of glasses was a revelation, like entering a new HD world that I didn't know I'd slowly left.

For schoolkids it's probably even bigger. They don't even know that their eyesight might not be just like every other kid. Worth testing, I did so with my kid and she got a light prescription.

> That first set of glasses was a revelation, like entering a new HD world that I didn't know I'd slowly left.

That same thing can happen even when you already have glasses. My lenses were something like 10 years old and I thought they were just fine. Until I got new glasses.

So true! In High School, we sometimes had to take turns reading out loud from textbooks of literature. I sucked at reading out loud, often reading out words that were not there or losing the line. That was embarrassing, which did not help. Turned out my vision was just not good enough to clearly see the characters when sitting with a straight back! But I never noticed it, because my vision was good enough for everyday situations. I don't remember clearly what finally triggered me to take a vision test, maybe it was for the drivers license.

I remember the same! I was amazed that my friend could read the number on the front of the bus while it was still 300 metres away. How can you read that? I asked. I just read it, why? can't you read it?

I was 14 but fortunately was not really short sighted, although I found that I was instinctively sitting closer to the blackboard (rememebr those!), maybe because I couldn't see clearly from the back of the class.

It's funny how a relatively small investment early on could help avoid a load of unemployment, crime, etc. even if there was no money, just make it a loan that you only pay back once you earn, say, $30 a year or more!

> For schoolkids it's probably even bigger. They don't even know that their eyesight might not be just like every other kid.

This is definitely true. I got my first pair of glasses at 7, and I hadn't realised I needed them. Luckily my mum is also short sighted and she noticed me straining to see things.

Also interesting: my eyes worsened to my current prescription of around -4 relatively quickly over the next 4-5 years. But I only started wearing my glasses full time when my optician mentioned that he was amazed that I didn't. Until that time I'd been quite happy wandering around with blurry vision most of the time. Kids truly are very adaptable.

My vision for much of my first 30 years straddled the line where I could get a driver's license that said I didn't need glasses¹ although I started wearing glasses in kindergarten. I was pretty inconsistent about glasses wearing for a lot of that time, but now, my vision has deteriorated to the point where I need glasses for both near and far correction—I've had progressive lenses for almost a decade now.

1. More precisely, I didn't need glasses in California. In Illinois, I did—I got my first CA driver's license in 1990, replacing an IL driver's license. Then I moved back to IL in 1997, then back to CA in 2004, and back to IL in 2011². All my IL licenses required me to drive with glasses.

2. If the pattern held, I'd have moved back to Los Angeles in 2018, but it appears I'm in Chicago until I retire.

There's now a treatment using low-concentration atropine eye drops to more-or-less stop the further deteriorating of the eyes (at least for near-sightedness).

Our ophthalmologist told us about this when we took our oldest there after noticing she had some issues in seeing things properly from a distance. Since my wife and myself have on average -8 we were keeping an eye out (ha!) on our kids for any signs of vision issues.

Basically every night before bed you put a drop in each eye and keep this up for as long as they're still growing. If you can start early enough this means they can end up with e.g. -1.5 or -2 instead of regressing all the way to e.g. -8.5 like me. Definitely a quality-of-life improvement, less chance of other eye issues later on, reduced cost of glasses and easier treatment with a laser to get back to 0 in case they want that.

It's fairly new, at least here in Europe, so not all doctors are familiar with it. Same for pharmacists: they need to prepare these eye drops themselves since they are not available directly from a manufacturer in this low concentration.

How does this compare with corneal moulding?

I had my first set of glasses at 7. I was diagnosed with myopia, -1.5 and went to get some glasses done. I hated the glasses and my parents insisted I wear them, but I could not frigging see with them and kept saying I have blurry vision with them. High source of friction with my parents. 1 year passes and we visit the optician again, it turns out the glasses were +1.5 - no wonder they were useless to me.

>Luckily my mum is also short sighted and she noticed me straining to see things.

My parents just kept scolding me for sitting too close to the TV. I had to ask for them on many occasions and eventually got them to get me tested. It had got so bad that I couldn't read anything written on the blackboard for a long while.

> For schoolkids it's probably even bigger. They don't even know that their eyesight might not be just like every other kid.

During 6th grade I transitioned from being able to read the blackboard to not being able to read the blackboard, unless I was sitting closer.

Not realizing there's a problem is something that might come up for kindergarteners, but not for kids who are already in school.

I disagree, at least somewhat.

I got my first pair in grade 3 and the next day, it looked like the teacher had dramatically upgraded the chalk she was using. I could actually read it and follow along easily, but the day before I didn’t know anything was “wrong” and I was sure “I don’t need glasses!!”

I think people in general are slow to notice gradual changes. “Maybe the new school’s board is different. Maybe the teacher sucks at writing. Maybe this lighting is worse. (But mostly,) I’ll just squint a little and get by.”

I was also in grade 3 before we realized I needed glasses. I had changed schools mid-year, and my old school had me sitting front and center because I learned quickly, but the new one had me seated in the back in the corner because my last name starts with W.

I also didn't realize what was wrong, but it turned out I was only nearsighted in one eye.

I'm grateful my parents were paying enough attention and had the resources to recognize that it wasn't just a problem adjusting to the new school that was making me struggle in class, but that there was actually something physically making it harder for me to succeed.

Walking out with my glasses on, I immediately panicked about the fact that the clouds were bumpy, so it had probably been a problem much longer than we'd realized!

I did not have my vision tested (beyond infancy/toddler blindness tests) until I was 15. In hindsight (so to speak) my vision was probably similar all through childhood (both parents needed glasses in childhood). I could read (and loved it) so no problem right? My vision loss is asymmetric and I was aware of that -- but I also knew everyone tends to have a more dominant eye so I never thought much about it. The idea I had poor vision never occurred to me (or anyone else!)

I've worn glasses daily since. I can still legally drive without them (passed the vision test) but the prospect is a frightening one given that I can't read the text on my computer monitor at my usual preferred size without my glasses unless I squint.

> Not realizing there's a problem is something that might come up for kindergarteners, but not for kids who are already in school.

That's only true if your eyesight degraded while you were aware, not if it was already bad. I didn't get glasses until I was 16 and I never knew I needed them until I almost failed the vision test for my driver's license.

> Not realizing there's a problem is something that might come up for kindergarteners, but not for kids who are already in school.

That's just not true. You're an exception, actually. Most vision changes are way too gradual to notice.

The moment I realized I needed glasses was when we got our first HD TV. I was the only one who didn't notice any difference in quality.

This. I finally convinced an optometrist to grant me a perscription in my third year as an undergraduate. It was a weak perscription, but it made the difference between getting a C average and suddenly getting an A average because I no longer had to put so much brain processing power into seeing what was on the board and could put the same processing power into understanding what I saw.

Then it happened again as I got older and my arms grew too short to be able to read a book and the fonts grew too large to display enough information on a single screen.

Again and again US surprises us all as if it was a third world country.

Study shouldn't be surprising at all - pupils who struggle to see, struggle to learn. Giving them eyeglasses helps a lot.

I would imagine a study like this would be a thing in some third world country. Reading the title you would imagine some poorly lit classroom, wooden walls and clay floor and etc.

But it is Baltimore?

I grew up in Soviet and then Post-Soviet country. We all had eyesight tests every year, maybe even twice a year. If anything - you got eyeglasses. Yeah, maybe you were bullied for a week by pupils but that's it.

To be fair I am a bit shocked with US...

It's not the United States of Baltimore. While there no doubt are parents spread across the country who neglect their children's health needs, to extrapolate the neglectful parents in Baltimore to the entire country makes as much sense as to do the same for Pripyat's radiation levels to all areas of the former Soviet Union.

I get what you are saying.

However I guess I was referring to all healthcare system in the US. I believe all over the Europe kid would be tested for free, every year, mandatorily. If eye correction is needed one would be supplied. So study like this wouldn't even be possible. Of course maybe some minimum payment would be needed, parents involved, etc. etc. But these are only details.

However the problem itself is not a problem of neglectful parents. It is a problem of healthcare system/educational system and society as whole.

I doubt it's mandatory and every year in all of Europe, although that would fit my expectations of ex-Soviet and former-Eastern-Bloc countries.

In England it is free, but at best it's automatic once. Otherwise it's up to the parent to arrange.

In Denmark it's done at age 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Statistics for 30 countries: https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloa...

"Draft Country Reports were created based on responses from each country representative. Each draft Country Reports followed the same template and contained sections relating to: the population and healthcare system; vision screening commissioning and guidance; vision screening procedure for each age group (premature babies to age 7 years);" at page 5.

It looks like report is based on responses of experts, kids 0 - 7.

This was my gut reaction too: no shit your performance increases if you use glasses when you need glasses! This is a finding on par with "giving food to hungry kids improves wellbeing"

Also, when you dont need to know prescription strength judged to 0.1 diopter accuracy, & ignore stuff like cilinder correction, a vision test is super cheap to perform, right?

Then, even supplying 5$ plastic glasses from the bargain bin would be a dramatic quality of life improvement for afflicted kids.

I share your feeling of shock.

I never understood why we (in the US) treat eyes differently for insurance purposes. I can’t think of any medical device for which it makes more sense to have a single payer system. The positive social externalities from having a populace who is able to see is enormous and would more than pay for itself. Things like car accidents, workplace related injuries, better school outcomes, etc.

But for some reason we’ve gone the complete opposite direction. Not only is eyesight not single payer it’s somehow been excluded from most health insurance and the vision plans that do exist aren’t particularly helpful.

And optometrists are permitted to cultivate a misleading* impression that you must or should buy your eyeglasses from them, and their cheapest model is $200 and every pair in the shop is probably sold by Luxottica.

Getting a new pair of glasses was an unreasonably rare and precious thing when I was growing up, because of the cost.

*in general, optometrists must produce a copy of the prescription that was paid for when asked, and then you can take it wherever. Make sure they write down your pupillary distance on it; they often "forget" to do this.

There are many, many studies one could run in Baltimore which, if extrapolated to the rest of the country, would definitely paint a pretty grim picture of the USA.

The life expectancy in Seton Hill of Baltimore is lower than that of Yemen's. The murder rate in the city as a whole is higher than El Salvador or Guatemala.

Those who've never visited have a hard time understanding just how undesirable of a place Baltimore really is.

One of my kids started school last year. He did well, learned to read etc., but we noticed that unlike his older sibling, he didn't seem to like letters, numbers and books much. We never seemed able to concentrate for more than a minute.

So in the summer break, we had his vision tested, and it was +6 and +4. Turns out that although you are half blind you can somehow manage to read and write anyways. In a matter of weeks after he got glasses, he taught himself to read in English, a language he doesn't even have in school but that he knows from YouTube and Netflix, and with letters different from the Cyrillic alphabet he knew.

If like us, you live in a place where kids' vision is not tested automatically by your physician, I can only encourage you to have your kids' vision tested.

It seems obvious that glasses help at school if you actually need them. But I’m happy to see that it was also proven by research. This will definitely help get funding for more programs like this.

I couldn’t afford glasses during my high school and I bet my academic performance would be much better if I could see what’s written on the blackboard.

My parents didn't get me glasses until I was eight years old. I thought blurry was normal. They thought I was dyslexic because I was routinely failing spelling tests.

It wasn't that I was failing them, it's that I relied on spelling phonetically, because when they wrote the words on the blackboard during practice time, I couldn't see them, even at the front of the class, so I just made up my own spellings as the teacher called them out.

When I finally got glasses (massive, horrible tortoiseshell things with huge lenses provided (only in part) by the NHS, I finally realised things like: Trees have leaves! all the way up, not just on the ground, and that teachers often had a pained look on their faces.

I suspect hearing is similar.

When I was a freshman in high school, nurse calls up my mom and angrily questions her on why I had never gotten a hearing aid for my right ear for the loss. Mom was like, what hearing loss? The nurse had looked up my record from elementary school. I had been failing hearing tests since 2nd grade and nobody told my parents, or me for that matter. They tested it every year, so that's 7 failures in a row. Catholic school BTW, but it was the 80s, might be better now.

It took me a little more than a year to understand I have a problem with my eyesight (difficulty focusing on close by objects and additional distortion on the left eye). And half a year more to formulate what kind of distortion I have. I'm adult and have a baseline to compare to.

Kids might not even understand they have a problem.

It’s even difficult for adults to admit something might be wrong with eyesight

Even adults with existing conditions! Having heavy myopia I spent more than a year assuming that I had to get new prescription glasses because my vision had became worse. Turns out I had these very nice cataracts and needed surgery.

Don't neglect your eyes!

It’s hard for children too. I know a very young child (preschool) with glasses, and even they feel insecure about their eyes.

It's pretty important to check, especially if you stare at monitors all day like the HN crowd. You may have a small impairment that's not noticeable. Except you'll notice you're far less tired after a day's work when you correct it.

Source: discovering my astigmatism (with about zero dioptries) only at 29.

I had a hard time keeping up with taking notes and then I had my eyes tested and got glasses and it wasn’t an issue anymore .

I just thought I was slow because I could read the board, it just took me a few seconds to focus each time I looked up, which slowed me down.

I didn't get glasses until age 10 (grade 5), and more or less couldn't read what the teachers were writing on the blackboard before then.

Alternative or additional causality: kids with eyeglasses have fewer friends and more time to focus on homework

So, you do better if you can see?

A followup study has revealed blindfolds reduce academic performance

Yeah because they turn into nerds looooooooool

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