Q: WHAT ABOUT DYSLEXIA AND READING COMPREHENSION? Answer: For many older and certainly remediated dyslexic people silent reading comprehension may be strong and unimpaired. Students who still struggle significantly with decoding will obviously have trouble with...
How Dyslexia Changes at Different Ages [Premium]
With all of the advances in our understanding of early intervention, dyslexia in older students and young adults often gets short shrift. The paper by Dr. Kathleen Niesen and colleagues has some interesting findings that have important points for identification, accommodations, and understanding of both the challenges and strengths of adolescents and young adults with dyslexia. Importantly, the authors made this point: “…if dyslexia was not diagnosed earlier in schooling, young adults do not qualify for accommodations even if as adolescents and adults they meet research criteria for dyslexia on evidence-based assessment. Such assessment practices do not seem fair or sensible or consistent with the spirit of the Americas for Disabilities legislation.” The point made was that dyslexia missed in the early grades usually meant dyslexia […]
[PREMIUM] TEST-TAKING: DYSLEXIA and MULTIPLE CHOICE
At the secondary and university level, many students with dyslexia may prefer short answer questions to multiple choice. There are many reasons why the multiple choice question format may not be a good estimator of a student’s knowledge. It is very common for the questions and choice answers to be ambiguous. From Biochemical Education: “Writing good multiple choice questions is hard, a fact not appreciated by all teachers and examiners. There is a tendency to use imprecise terms, and even when apparently precise terms such as always and never are used (for example in true/false type tests), it seems that not everyone agrees these are indeed absolutes….In a survey of medical examiners, Holsgrove and Elzubeir found that of 63 respondents, 51 considered that always means […]
STRONGER Interconnected Retelling of Stories by Dyslexic Children
In a recent study, researchers found that children with dyslexia (2nd-5th graders) had a better ability to discuss links between a text read compared to fellow students who were at the same decoding level. This might be early evidence of the 'big picture' strengths...