It sounds like you are in a really challenging place. I read your original post but was hoping someone would first jump in with some of the research you were looking for, as all I can contribute is really musings and more questions (just what you need!). Some of this may thus respond to info since deleted, so apologies in advance if I confuse the details.
Background: As context, both my kids have been keyboarding since about grade 2, for different reasons. DD12 is dyslexic and dysgraphic. DS15 is, well, not really sure, but writing is excruciating, seemingly due to a mix of expressive language disability/ retrieval issues (my guess) and slow processing and severe inattentive ADHD. He's also hypermobile, though not diagnosed with a particular overriding cause. Both can handprint when needed, but at a drastic quality/ productivity cost (and for DS, physical discomfort). We're lucky that we haven't had to go to AT for math, which does get more complicated, but I've also negotiated (battled) extensively over the years to get the excess writing aspects of math reduced (which was an especially huge problem in their younger years).
Research: On the research side, I too have been unnerved by frequent claims that handwriting is critical to learning. I have tried to track these claims when I see them, but haven't made a concerted effort to hunt down research on this question. Generally, however, I have found that I pretty quickly end up at a source that is some teacher claiming they "just know it" because kids these days compared to when she started teaching....
I do remember one more substantive study, on college students retaining more info when taking lecture notes via paper vs laptop. But I was pretty frustrated with the limited scope of the study and that they didn't seem to have given any thought to effects due to variations in the learning abilities of the participating students, or the generalizability of the findings. IOW, even if the results were true, it still didn't tell me whether they would be applicable to someone with automaticity issues that affect writing.
My (very) personal, (very) inexpert opinion, shaped by my family as well as oodles of reading what lit I can find and parent experiences in places like this, is that (a) I suspect it may not be true (research seems awful weak), and (b) it probably doesn't apply to LD even if it is.
As I understand it, the more you can reduce the demand on working memory, the more you can learn. On this, the psych research is unequivocal. When you lack automaticity in writing, reading, spelling, calculation, whatever, all your brain power is sucked up with the lower-level mechanics and little is left for higher-level analysis - or even listening while taking notes. So in general, my advice is to on one hand, do everything you can to increase automaticity and free up brain power. But on the other hand, also do everything you can to just bypass the un-automated skill when *thinking* is the goal.
Remediation and A/T: For us, that has meant lots of reading remediation for DD, but read-aloud/ audiobooks and scribing and AT when she wanted to think and produce stuff. She's now self-sufficient with her AT for writing (mostly tablet with word prediction), and reading is decent if slow and needs repeats. We still plug away at spelling remediation (because she is a writer and thinking about how to spell every word when she's writing really screeches her creativity to a halt), but otherwise ignore spelling in her work. One exception remains poetry - when she creates poetry, her brain moves so fast she can't type it, and instead scrawls illegible smudges across her whiteboard, then dictates to me to type up immediately before she forgets it, because even she can't really read it. This summer we're going to practice editing with Grammerly, but that will be a separate exercise from creating written work. (The goal there is increasing independence rather than automaticity.)
For DS the math monster, it has meant taking verbatim notes for him on brainstorming and written schoolwork (he's now pretty self-sufficient typing on a laptop). Also, a whiteboard for extracurricular math, where I've done the bulk of the writing over the years so he can focus on the math he loves without writing getting in the way. (He still prefers the whiteboard, and for extracurricular courses like AoPS and others I have just taken pictures of his work and put them into a PDF to submit - never been a problem). Both kids tried speech-to-text - which is a godsend for many and I highly recommend trying - but mine found it frustrating (it's not great with kid voices, and hard to use at school) and takes a lot of practice too. I suspect DD will go back to it over the next few years, though.
FWIW, both use keyboarding for almost all schoolwork and tests (except math). For instance, DS in high school science will keyboard most of a test, while handwriting formula, diagrams, etc on the original test paper. Anything that involves a full sentence is on the computer. As long as they could handwrite school math and avoid unnecessary writing and repetitive worksheets, we've actually done fine with quite basic AT - mostly what's built into an iPad or Google classroom.
I'm matching your original post here for background detail, I realize, and still haven't gotten to the point - but you had a lot of questions! Don't have time to make this shorter
, so I've added in some headings to help navigate....
Automaticity: One thing that really jumped out at me in your post was that you mentioned lack of automaticity as well as spelling errors. As far as I understand (another place I was waiting for aeh's expertise!), a purely physical issue like hypermobility would not cause these issues, but a cognitive processing issue like dysgraphia would. From the collective experience of parents here, I have concluded that while physical weaknesses that affect writing can be strengthened, dysgraphia does not seem very amenable to remediation. Any number of people have reported short-term improvements that vanish as soon as the OT etc stops - in other words, automaticity does not seem to improve in the long term. (It's like my kids with LD being able to ace a spelling or multiplication test - and then not remembering any of it the next week, as soon as they stop the constant practice that's keeping it in their short-term memory. It never automated.) So it's important to know what problems you are addressing, and how much you can realistically hope to improve automaticity. Reading is super remediable, and worth every second of effort. Executive function can be improved, though a lot is finding and practicing your own work-arounds and back-up systems. A lot of other LD stuff, however, doesn't automate readily.
You have unique and in-depth experience with your family so far, of both significant challenges and major effort and resources to remediate. It sounds like you are assessing that experience, but not quite trusting your own assessment. Trust your judgement; you are an expert in your kids. What, exactly, have been the benefits for your older two (concrete as well as theoretical possibilities)? What have been the costs, especially including opportunity costs, to all of you? Are the benefits worth the costs? Are there differences in child 3 vs the other two that would significantly change the nature or weight of those costs and benefits?
With respect to your Q3, I have concluded that a person with automaticity issues that affect writing can think, or they can write. Pick one. Because you only get one. So what's the priority in this particular task? Honestly, when it comes to something like note-taking, not only would I not go hand-written if that will impair listening and understanding, I encourage recording and/ photos of the board as appropriate, and as much as possible. Writing should be a tool to help learning and communicating. If it's a barrier to those, I try to find another way of doing it.
Final thoughts. For gifted kids with LD, the question is often much less "Can they do it?", but rather, "At what cost?" They have amazing strengths and compensation skills. With enough time and effort and perfect alignment of the stars, they can do almost anything - produce, say, beautiful handwriting (but it's created as a picture, not automated letters) and do all sorts of impressive things. But just because they could do it once doesn't mean they can do it everytime. That's the very frustrating and confusing reality of LD, magnified for 2E. And when they do it, there's a huge amount of other things they can't do at the same time. They have to have priorities, they have to choose.
It's been hard for me as a parent who didn't have these struggles myself to understand and truly accept and support and even encourage these limitations and choices. It's been an even harder battle with schools and others who see the ability, and assume the kid
could do it all if they just. tried. harder. There are some things my kids can improve a little or a lot, and some in which they will never get much better. And some things that just aren't worth the cost. That's not me being a pessimist, that's just reality. Time is a lot more finite when you're 2E. Choices are harder. Opportunity cost really, really matters. We are enormously fortunate to live in a world where there are so many other ways of doing things. Over the years, I have gotten more comfortable with working around the low-level mechanics as much as humanly possible, and focusing our effort on the higher-level stuff that keeps my kids learning and pursuing their passions and supporting their strengths with as few barriers as possible.
So that's our experience so far. Sorry about the book!!
