American Dyslexia Association

Tag: testing

  • Three Ways to Help Teens with Dyslexia Prepare for Exams

    Three Ways to Help Teens with Dyslexia Prepare for Exams

    by Hailey Thompson

    Exam period can be a stressful time for teens, parents, and teachers alike. Everyone wants their child to do their best, whatever that looks like for them, and for older teens, there can be additional pressure around needing the results to get into higher education.


    But there can be even more stress for people with dyslexia, who may struggle with the mainstream method of exam preparation offered in school. If you’re trying to support someone in this position, you may feel a bit lost when it comes to what practical assistance you can offer. Here, we take a look at three things you can do to help.


    Help them make a plan
    Especially in their mid-teens, high school students may find themselves overwhelmed with the number of subjects they need to revise for, and the number of exams they have on their timetable. This can lead to panic and a feeling of running out of time, which impacts their mental well-being as well as their ability to study.

    One thing you can do is to offer to help them make a plan to manage their time, so that they know that they have enough time to revise for all their subjects, as well as knowing clearly when exams are. They could put this up in their bedroom, or in a communal space like the kitchen, so that everyone knows when they’ll be focusing. Just make sure that you use this as a support tool for your teen, and not as a way for you to put pressure on them when they’re taking a break.


    Support shared studying
    Some people with dyslexia find it hard to study alone. Dyslexia can make it hard for teens to concentrate, and reading their notes alone can be very hard work. Instead, support your teen by facilitating shared study time, perhaps with friends or in after-school study groups. You can also ask older relatives or friends to help, if they’ve sat the exam before.

    By letting your teen know that you are ok with them having people over to study, or taking them to a friend’s house, you are giving them practical support. If you’re able to and they want to, you could also offer to quiz them, or let them talk through a specific area to check their understanding.


    Consider getting them extra support
    Your teen might not feel comfortable with you helping test them, or you might not feel that you have enough knowledge on the subject. In this instance, getting a tutor can help them get the answers they need, and teens with dyslexia might find that they have a better understanding of a topic if they talk through it rather than read it themselves.


    Tutors can also help with confidence, and show your teen that they have the tools they need to succeed in their exams. Make sure to do your homework beforehand, and choose a tutor that is right for your family, and make it clear to your child that they can let you know if the tutor turns out not to be the right fit.
    It’s really important to make sure they trust this person and feel comfortable with them in order to get the most out of their sessions.

  • Kids Can’t Wait: Strategies to Support Struggling Readers

    Kids Can’t Wait: Strategies to Support Struggling Readers

    By Kyle Redford – YCDC Education Editor

    Strategies to Support Struggling Readers Which Don’t Require a Ph.D. in Neuropsychology

    I have a confession to make.  It involves a basic failure on my behalf.  What’s worse, my failure impacted students whom I care deeply about: students with dyslexia and other language-based learning challenges. It involved waiting for test results before putting accommodations in place for students who were struggling in my class. Of course I didn’t fail them intentionally, and by about the third time I got an evaluation back that pretty much said what I imagined it would, I started putting help in place for the student right away. The discovery of my own blind spot led me to wonder if other teachers were accidentally failing their students in similar ways.

    For many years, this is what I did: I would identify a student who was having problems, make some basic observations about what was particularly difficult for him, and then request further information about the student in the form of screening, special tests, and/or a learning evaluation.  I would then wait for a report before taking further action. I  am often haunted by memories of a particular former eighth-grade history student whose contributions to our discussions put him at the top of the class, but his written answers on tests and essays were always weak and minimalist and put him only in the high C range.  At the time, I thought it was sufficient to label this descrepancy and recommend that he get a formal evaluation.  I suspected a test would reveal that he was dyslexic.  His English teacher concurred.  Unfortunately, his father would have nothing to do with outside testing, so my brilliant student received low Bs in my class and never got the help he needed to express what he knew.

    But really, what was I waiting for? If asked, I would have responded that I needed more specific information about the student before I could know best how to support him. To many readers, I am sure that response sounds legitimate and reasonable. However, my confession is aimed at fellow teachers who will understand why my delay was unnecessary.  I know that I am not alone when I admit that I can usually make general assumptions about what a learning evaluation is going to say before the results are in.  Most often the report confirms what I had intuitively guessed about the student.  As personally validating and satisfying as that confirmation often is, it should not be a prerequisite to providing timely critical accommodations to my students.

    Immediately employing accommodations makes sense for many reasons.  First, evaluations take time to schedule and complete.  Why waste time waiting to have suspicions confirmed before helping a student?  Secondly, there are those untidy problems of cost and access.  Testing and evaluations are expensive and for many an unobtainable luxury.  For a variety of reasons, public schools can be stingy with these resources, and many independent schools wrongly assume that parents can afford this expense on top of the cost of the school’s tuition.  Consequently, many students who need the help that an evaluation can provide are denied it.

    I need to be clear about something—I remain an enthusiastic proponent of testing and evaluations.  Teachers are greatly assisted by the critical information that they yield. Outside testing provided by learning specialists offers a unique opportunity to isolate many classroom variables and specifically reveal and identify students’ academic strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, testing helps assess how extreme students’ gaps are and what level of response is necessary.  That information is a real gift to teachers, parents, and most importantly, students, and it is a gift that keeps on giving because tests allow future teachers to understand the student’s profile.  Lastly, evaluations are required for students to qualify for accommodations on high-stakes tests such as SATs, ACTs, and state exams.  All identified students should be provided access to them.

    For A Student Struggling with Understanding the Classroom Reading Assignments

    • Suggest listening to audiobooks or identify a willing adult to read the assigned book to the student.  Recommend that students read along with the audiobook version or to follow the words alongside the reader.  The more often a struggling reader is exposed to the way they words look, the better. Exposure to the page helps students learn the architecture of sentences.  This also helps with spelling and conventions.
    • Suggest use of assistive technologies currently available that read material aloud to the student.  The Kindle, the iPad, or Google’s Nexus tablet, would be examples of this kind of technology, but there are many similar devices being introduced into the market all the time. Click here to read a comparison of these tablets.
    • If the book/content has been made into a film or covered in a film, suggest that the student watch it to help give a context to the story or content.
    • Offer extra time to finish reading assignments. Dyslexic and struggling readers need more time to read assigned material.
    • Provide class syllabuses in advance. Allow the student to read assignments ahead over the school breaks and the summer. This can help the student get a head start so that when the school year takes on its full momentum she is prepared and has had an opportunity to work ahead to absorb the increased volume of work.
    • Recommend reading books with larger fonts.  Hardback versions from the library are visually easier and E-readers offers the ability to adjust the font size as well.
    • Recommend books that may be shorter or less dense but equally rich in ideas and story for independent reading time. (Click here for a kid-tested reading list.) It is important to recommend the book with enthusiasm, the same enthusiasm typically reserved for more sophisticated titles. Read well-written, easier books yourself, out loud to the class, and recommend them to all students so the struggling students can read them without shame.  The objective is to get struggling readers to read AND to like it. (For more on creating a classroom culture for struggling readers, click here.)
    • Recommend graphic novels. (Click here for a listing of kid-approved ones.) Graphic novels provide struggling readers with a way of strengthening their vocabularies, build their reading confidence, and foster their appreciation of story. Graphic novels can also help support a reader’s understanding of everything from Greek Mythology to Shakespheare.Dictating ideas to an adult can help a student get started with their writing by generating an idea bank that they can draw from. (They also won’t get caught up  worrying about how to spell those words)

    Continue reading: http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/resources/educators/instruction/kids-cant-wait-strategies-to-support-struggling-readers/

  • How Testing Kids For Skills Can Hurt Those Lacking Knowledge

    How Testing Kids For Skills Can Hurt Those Lacking Knowledge

    Excerpted from THE KNOWLEDGE GAP by Natalie Wexler, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Wexler.

    By Natalie Wexler

    In 1987, two researchers in Wisconsin, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, constructed a miniature baseball field and installed it in an empty classroom in a junior high school. They peopled it with four-inch wooden baseball players arranged to simulate the beginning of a game. Then they brought in sixty-four seventh- and eighth-grade students who had been tested both for their general reading ability and their knowledge of baseball.

    The goal was to determine to what extent a child’s ability to understand a text depended on her prior knowledge of the topic. Recht and Leslie chose baseball because they figured lots of kids in junior high school who weren’t great readers nevertheless knew a fair amount about the subject. Each student was asked to read a text
    describing half an inning of a fictional baseball game and move the wooden figures around the board to reenact the action described.

    Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop, the passage began. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars’ left-fielder.

    It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in students’ ability to understand the text—more of a difference than their supposed reading level. The kids who knew little about baseball, including the “good” readers, all did poorly. And among those who knew a lot about baseball, the “good” readers and the “bad” readers all did well. In fact, the bad readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the good readers who didn’t.

    In another study, researchers read preschoolers from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds a book about birds, a subject they had determined the higher-income kids already knew more about. When they tested comprehension, the wealthier children did significantly better. But then they read a story about a subject neither group knew anything about: made-up animals called wugs. When prior knowledge was equalized, comprehension was essentially the same. In other words, the gap in comprehension wasn’t a gap in skills. It was a gap in knowledge.

    The implication is clear: abstract “reading ability” is largely a mirage constructed by reading tests. A student’s ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on his familiarity with the subject; no degree of “skill” will help if he lacks the knowledge to understand it. While instruction in the early grades has focused on “learning to read” rather than “reading to learn,” educators have overlooked the fact that part of “learning to read” is acquiring knowledge.

    Continue with article here:

    https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54054/how-testing-kids-for-skills-hurts-those-lacking-knowledge