The Department of Justice has also released video clarification of key rights for students regarding testing accommodations under the ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act. The entire video is located at the bottom of this post, but we are highlighting a section...
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 […]
"My daughter currently has an IEP. We asked that we keep her accommodations of the IEP in place but take a break from the support she is receiving from the resource teachers, with both pull out and push in. We were told that we need to revoke her IEP in order to do...
From the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, up to 1 in 6 students are dyslexic, but only a minority of these students will be found in special education classrooms. What does this mean for regular classroom teachers? 1. Get Basic Facts about Dyslexia - Dyslexic students...
![Could it be GRAMMAR? [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.38.10-AM.jpg)
Hidden grammar difficulties can be common reason why older students with dyslexia hit a plateau with reading, writing, and even testing. The problem is so subtle at times that many difficulties may be missed for years if not for their entire academic careers. One of the reasons that the problem is difficult to detect is that even many standardized tests that are commonly used for assessing the possibility of dyslexia either don’t test for it or they don’t pinpoint the problems that cause the student to struggle. In the early grades, students who have “overcome dyslexia” by the mastery of decoding, may find they hit a plateau as sentences become longer and more complex. In the middle and high school years, unrecognized grammar problems may […]
"I'M GOING TO tell you a secret. It's something almost no one in my professional life knows. I'm dyslexic." Lisa Wood Shapiro is a prolific writer and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who opened her article in Wired with her dyslexia 'confession'! "Given that knowledge,...
Children with dyslexia should be screened for hearing problems, says a UK researcher, after her research team found that 1 in 4 students had significant hearing problems that were not suspected by parents. Their study also found that 1 in 3 children with a hearing...
![Processing Speed & Writing [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-10.47.06-AM.jpg)
Question: I know my son’s processing speed is slow from his testing, but how slow should his speed on something like writing take? My son has slow processing speed, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a loose attention control system – but how long should it take him to write a 5 paragraph academic paper… after which the paper still needs revisions? It takes him hours to complete assignments. This is a great question…but of course, the answer depends on a lot of individual factors regarding your student. When essay or paper writing takes so long, it’s good to try to troubleshoot ways to make the process quicker. If the delay occurs at the beginning, before any ‘writing’ occurs, then maybe he doesn’t have a template in which […]
![Organizing Tips for the Dyslexic Academic [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.50.54-PM.jpg)
A request came through from one of our Premium subscribers. What strategies are helpful for the dyslexic academic or working professional who needs to organize and synthesize from large quantities of information? The first step is SIMPLIFY. Argument Mapping As Dyslexic PhD Dr. Emma Jeffries says in her video below, looking for the key points in an argument helps her map the essence of what a journal article or paper is presenting. When she has a big text or paper that she has to read, she uses key questions to focus her reading. Sometimes a mentor or professor can also focus your reading on key topics or questions. Emma describes how she sketches notes that help get the gist of data that she is analyzing. […]
![Dyslexia at College: THE CHALLENGE OF WRITING [Premium]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.43.51-PM.jpg)
As dyslexic college students are entering 2- and 4- year colleges in increasing numbers, questions arise as to the impact of dyslexia-related challenges on essay writing. The National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 had found that although a majority of LD students in high school requested accommodations (91%), only 17% requested accommodations in college. A problem with this situation is that the net result is that written work (especially timed written work) will typically substantially underestimate a student’s fund of knowledge and understanding. A recent study at Oxford Brookes University showed that college students with dyslexia matched their non-dyslexic peers in terms of word diversity, ideas, organization, sentence structure, and even grammar. The tasks in which they scored lower than their peers were so-called “low-level transcription skills” […]
![The Curious History of Mirror Writing [PREMIUM]](https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Screen-Shot-2019-08-30-at-8.56.30-PM.jpg)
“As a researcher, working over two decades with hundreds of children and adults with dyslexia, I’m convinced that Leonard Da Vinci was dyslexic.” – Dr Maryann Wolf, author Proust and the Squid Mirror writing occurs commonly in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children between the ages of 3 and 7 years, however a subset of children will have persistent difficulties with letter reversals – and these children (or adults) will be more likely to have significant dyslexia or other LD. It at least one study, mirror writing was thought to occur in only ~ 10% of dyslexics, but its been estimated to be 30% of lefties. Even if mirror writing is only a significant problem in a minority of dyslexics – this rate is 16-fold higher than […]
“English A was ‘a disaster and French was like medieval torture. To sit down with a blank piece of paper and write was the most traumatic thing that had ever faced me in life. I had ideas in my head, but I could not get the stuff down. It was a crushing time.” – Charles Schwab “It will be particularly helpful if they give themselves practice in precis writing, paraphrasing, and note-taking. If one has to write a precis one is forced not only to think out carefully what are the key ideas in a particular passage but also to express them concisely, accurately, and clearly. Paraphrasing makes similar demands and also forces one to consider the style of the original and to be critical […]
