When children experience difficulties learning to read, including struggles with spelling, recognizing, or pronouncing words, they may benefit from being tested for developmental dyslexia, the most prevalent neurobehavioral learning disability. Dyslexia makes up 80-90% of diagnosed learning disorders, impacting approximately 1 out of every 5 Americans.
What is Dyslexia?
As defined by the Learning Disabilities Association of America, dyslexia often displays as difficulty with fluent and accurate recognition of words. The disorder becomes most recognizable in school, where otherwise intelligent students with dyslexia display troubles with word decoding, spelling, recognition, and comprehension.
For most people who struggle with dyslexia, the disability manifests in language issues, including a problem matching the sounds of letter patterns to the letters themselves, slowing down the reading process and creating the tendency to misread. Dyslexia can also cause attention issues and problems with visual memory.
How to Diagnose Dyslexia
Identifying dyslexia requires evaluations of deficits in academic skills and factors. Assessments should be reliable, sensitive, specific, and valid while including the following:
* Medical, educational, and developmental history provided by a physician or other healthcare provider
Questionnaires filled out by the child, teachers, and other caregivers
* Psychological evaluations to determine if anxiety, depression, or social problems could be impacting the child’s abilities
* Tests to pinpoint language and reading difficulties
* Neurology, vision, and hearing tests
* Academic tests to measure reading and language skills
Who Can Diagnose Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is not an identifiable physical ailment or a disease that can be diagnosed with a blood test or imaging. It is a learning disorder assessed using a profile highlighting atypical patterns while ruling out other causes, such as hearing or vision problems. If you’re unsure, there are plenty of experts out there that offer specialist support for diagnosing and treating dyslexia.
Diagnostic Referrals
In the United States, parents may request an evaluation for a learning disability through the school system if their child is experiencing difficulties in reading and other academic skills. School psychologists, independent educational psychologists, or neurologists may perform testing that can indicate dyslexia. A formal assessment is generally required for a child to qualify for special education services through school systems. The most efficient testing processes involve a team approach that may include special and regular education teachers, psychologists, neuropsychologists, speech-language pathologists, and medical professionals.
Use Caution When Choosing an Assessment Team
Parents should exercise caution when searching for a diagnostician for their child. Some individuals who offer testing services without the professional credentials required by schools to consider the tests valid. There are also online, fee-based services that provide informational reports, but these are generally not accepted as official documentation of dyslexia or other learning disabilities. Parents should also be aware that general screenings tied to particular treatments or programs should not be relied on in place of a formal diagnosis.
WPS can help you learn more about using the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD™) to help children succeed in school.
