Research impact

For 30 years, our research has repeatedly delivered practical outcomes for people with Down syndrome.

From pre-school reading to teenage life, our work has focused on understanding the precise nature of the difficulties experienced by people with Down syndrome and what can be done to help.

This has led to evidence-based interventions and teaching strategies that today inform progress for many thousands of people around the world.

Key findings

Key findings of the charity's research over the past 30 years include:

Visual learning strengths

• Children with Down syndrome find learning from listening more challenging due to hearing and verbal processing difficulties, and this leads to delays in speech, language and cognitive development.
• Using visual teaching methods, such as signing and reading, can lessen the impact of these difficulties and reduce the delays in speech, language and cognitive development.
• Children with Down syndrome use visual reading strategies for longer (at higher reading ages) than their typically-developing peers.

Reading development

• Most children with Down syndrome can learn to read and should start in their pre-school years.
• Early sight word reading is a particular strength for preschool children with Down syndrome.
• In school years, reading continues to be a strength for children with Down syndrome.

Speech, language and communication

• Teaching children with Down syndrome to read leads to permanent improvements in their speech, language and short-term memory skills.
• The specific delays in developing expressive grammar are linked to delays in developing spoken vocabularies.

Educational placements

• Children with Down syndrome who are fully included in mainstream schools have better speech and language skills, are more likely to be reading and writing, and to have more mature social behaviour.

Memory skills

• Memory training can improve short-term memory – both visual and verbal short-term memory when provided in inclusive classrooms alongside literacy instruction.

Number skills

• In school years learning to understand number can be a specific difficulty and the children's number performance is usually about two years behind their literacy skills.
• Early understanding of counting is, however, as good as in non-verbal mental age matched peers so more research is needed to identify the problems with later number.
• Using visual/multi-sensory teaching methods can assist children with Down syndrome to understand the number system and to calculate.