What a Dysgraphia Evaluation Can (and Can't) Tell You: Highlights from Dr. Rachna Varia's Expert Webinar
If you've ever sat across from an evaluator wondering what all those scores really mean, or watched a bright child freeze in front of a blank page, our latest Expert Webinar was made for you.
On November 2, Dr. Rachna Varia, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist with MindWell Psychology in Northern Virginia, joined us for Diagnosing Dysgraphia from a Psychoeducational Perspective: Subtypes, Assessment, and Limitations. Dr. Varia has spent more than 25 years conducting neuropsychological and psychoeducational evaluations, with a focus on early detection of dyslexia, dysgraphia and the learning challenges that often come with them. She brought all of that experience to an hour full of clear explanations, memorable comparisons and honest talk about what testing can and can't do.
Missed it? Here are the biggest takeaways. The full recording is free on dysgraphiaLEARN, and it's well worth your time.
First, a quick refresher
Dysgraphia is a specific learning disability that makes it difficult for children to express their thoughts in writing. It's often brushed off as "just messy handwriting," but as Dr. Varia showed, it can involve much more than that. For many kids, the challenge isn't knowing, it's showing.
1. There's no single "dysgraphia test"
This was Dr. Varia's first and most important point. "So there's no one test of dysgraphia. It's a battery of tests," she explained.
Why? Because writing asks the brain to do a lot at once: use language, spell, plan and organize ideas, hold those ideas in memory, judge space on the page and physically form letters. A good evaluation looks at each of these pieces to find where the writing process is breaking down for your child.
2. Dysgraphia can come from different places
Dr. Varia walked through a framework from Dr. Steven Feifer that describes three types of dysgraphia. Knowing which one (or ones) your child has points you toward the right kind of help.
Graphomotor dysgraphia: the physical act of writing. Handwriting never becomes automatic, so a child's energy goes into forming letters instead of into their ideas. Dr. Varia compared it to driving with a GPS that lags behind the road: you keep overcorrecting, and you end up slow and exhausted. Evaluators measure this with copying and drawing tasks, comparing results to children of the same age, down to the month. Early signs parents may notice at home include trouble coloring within the lines and with fine-motor tasks like buttoning, zipping and tying shoes.
Dyslexic dysgraphia: spelling and words. English is a tricky language to spell. The /f/ sound alone can be written as f (fit), ff (cliff), ph (phone) or gh (laugh). Children who spell by sound write words like "walkt" or "fone." Many quietly avoid words they can't spell. "So I have a lot of kids who dumb down their writing," Dr. Varia said. When a child's written work sounds much simpler than the way they talk, spelling may be the reason, and writing can start to feel stressful.
Executive dysgraphia: planning and organizing. This was one of the most eye-opening parts of the talk. A child can have neat handwriting and solid spelling and still have dysgraphia. Here, the trouble is with planning what to say, organizing it, keeping ideas in mind while writing, and revising. Dr. Varia called this the hardest type to measure.
One helpful picture from her slides: ideas flow through a pipe with several narrow points, or "bottlenecks," before they come out as writing. She also named visual-spatial planning (judging space and layout) as its own possible bottleneck. A child might be stuck at one point or at several at once.
3. The definitions don't always line up
Dr. Varia was candid that the medical definition (the DSM-5-TR), researchers' frameworks like Dr. Feifer's, and school criteria for an IEP don't all define dysgraphia the same way. Schools usually look for "educational impact," which can work against a child whose good grades depend on a lot of help at home. She described this as tricky and, to be transparent, political. For questions about IEP eligibility, she recommends connecting with an advocate.
4. Testing explains the why, not the whole story
Testing gives valuable clarity, but Dr. Varia was honest about its limits. Tests happen in a quiet, artificial setting. They measure skills one at a time. They don't capture how a child revises over several drafts, how executive skills play out in a busy classroom, or how anxiety and motivation affect writing.
That's why she always pairs test scores with real writing samples and input from teachers and parents. "So I'm just a real believer that we are working with the whole child. It's a 360 approach."
What parents can do: a dysgraphia evaluation checklist
Based on Dr. Varia's talk, here's what to look for and ask about:
A measure of visual-motor integration (how well the eyes and hands work together).
At least one composition test (writing a story or essay) for children in third grade and up. Handwriting and spelling tests alone can miss executive dysgraphia.
Your input. Bring writing samples and describe what homework time looks like, including how much help your child needs.
The whole picture. A useful evaluation describes strengths as well as weaknesses, and checks for conditions that often come along with dysgraphia, such as ADHD or dyslexia.
A clear reason to test. As Dr. Varia put it, "Don't pay me to tell you what you already know." Test when you need to learn something new.
Retesting when things change. Consider it when demands rise (like longer papers in high school), after a school change or after intervention. If you can, go back to the original evaluator so testing can be targeted.
What educators can do in the classroom
The webinar focused on assessment, but Dr. Varia shared several classroom practices along the way:
Skip the copying for students with graphomotor dysgraphia. Copying from the board or writing spelling words 10 times isn't a good use of their time or energy. "While writing can be a wonderful tool for a lot of people to encode information, for someone with graphomotor dysgraphia, it is not."
Consider cursive. For some students, it helps because there's less stopping and starting.
Teach spelling through patterns. Memorizing a list for Friday's test doesn't stick. Word families and the rules behind spelling do more.
Ask what the assignment is for. If it's about ideas, don't let spelling or handwriting get in the way. "The goal, again, of good writing is to get your ideas down on another platform in an organized way, and we never want spelling to be the barrier to that."
Notice simplified word choice. It can be a sign a student is avoiding words they can't spell.
Teach writing skills directly and celebrate revision. Writing is multi-draft work, and students can learn to take pride in it.
There's so much more in the full recording
This recap only scratches the surface. In the full webinar, you'll see Dr. Varia's illustrated slides, including the bottleneck pipe, real examples of the drawing and spelling tasks evaluators use, and the one-page results summary she gives families after testing. You'll also hear her answer audience questions about ADHD, the difference between dyslexia and dyslexic dysgraphia, when to retest and how to talk with your child's teacher.
Educators: a $9.99 certificate of attendance version is also available here.
Many attendees asked for a follow-up on interventions, so stay tuned!
Your next steps
Watch the free webinar on dysgraphiaLEARN.
Share this post with your child's teacher (or, educators, with the families you work with) so everyone is working from the same picture.
Keep learning with related webinars, including Testing for Specific Learning Disability in Written Expression, Understanding the Impact of Executive Function on Writing and The Handwriting Concern. Browse them all on dysgraphiaLEARN.
Educators, build your expertise with our online course Understanding the Basics of Dysgraphia for Elementary Education on dysgraphiaLEARN.
Get practical advice anytime by joining our monthly newsletter.
A big thank-you to Dr. Rachna Varia for sharing her expertise with our community, and to everyone who joined us live.
All information in this post comes from Dr. Rachna Varia's November 2, 2026 Dysgraphia Life Expert Webinar.
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