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I like this article because it talks about identifying signs of dyslexia by grade level.

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Teaching Students with Dyslexia: How to Recognize Early Warning Signs, Provide Effective Intervention, and Unlock Student Achievement | Lexia

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Dyslexia is one of the most common yet misunderstood learning disabilities. Find out the surprising truth about dyslexia, including the challenges, warning signs, and support strategies. This paper is a must-read for educators across all grade levels.

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Young Readers with Dyslexia Will be Identified Sooner and Receive Interventions and Accommodations Needed to Succeed in School

CONTACT: Dr. Sally Shaywitz, sally.shaywitz@yale.edu
Carmel Lepore, Carmel.lepore@yale.edu, (203) 785-4641

New Haven, Conn. - A new, first-of-its-kind screening tool will enable schools nationwide and internationally to quickly and reliably screen all kindergarten and first grade students for dyslexia, allowing early support and intervention for the estimated 20 percent of the population who have dyslexia, including 80 percent of those with learning disabilities.

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen ™, is an evidence-based assessment that helps teachers identify students in kindergarten and first grade who may have dyslexia. The low-cost assessment is delivered in less than five minutes per student, making it simple for schools to implement and use in evaluation of early readers.

Created by Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a global leader in dyslexia research and advocacy, the digital assessment emphasizes phonological, linguistic and academic performance. Shaywitz, the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine, is co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. As a physician-scientist, she conducts cutting-edge research that provides a 21st century scientific understanding of dyslexia.

"Right now in public schools, screening for and diagnosing dyslexia is practically non-existent, especially in low-income communities," said Shaywitz. "If children with dyslexia are not identified, they will never receive evidence-based interventions and accommodations that will change their lives for the better."

Dyslexia - an unexpected difficulty in reading in relation to an individual's higher level of intelligence - is likely a significant reason for the persistent reading achievement gap in children from all backgrounds. Those with dyslexia have difficulty appreciating the individual sounds in spoken language, affecting their ability to isolate the sounds within a spoken word and then to attach the appropriate letter to the sound. Those with dyslexia struggle to read fluently, spell words correctly and to learn a second language. Children with undiagnosed dyslexia are more likely to drop out of school and as adults have higher rates of unemployment, anxiety and depression. Some studies estimate that nearly 50 percent of the prison population is dyslexic.

To identify and address dyslexia early on, the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity partnered with Pearson to publish the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen™ and make it available to all young children across the country and internationally.

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen™ is based on teachers' keen observations, asking and ranking the answers to a short series of questions. Shaywitz conducted a longitudinal study to determine which questions were most likely to predict dyslexia in children several years later.

"These questions will allow us to gain valuable insight from the individual who knows the child's academic and reading functioning best - his or her classroom teacher," said Shaywitz.

She noted that recent published scientific data indicates that the achievement gap between dyslexic and typical readers is evident as early as first grade and that early identification of children at risk is critical to closing that gap. "Accommodations, such as extra time for school work, will help students demonstrate their true abilities and recognize that their reading struggles do not mean they are less capable or intelligent than their peers," said Shaywitz.

Shaywitz is the author of more than 250 scientific articles and chapters. Her award-winning book, Overcoming Dyslexia, details fundamental scientific findings on dyslexia and how to translate this scientific knowledge into policy and clinical practice.

About the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity
The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity (YCDC) is the preeminent source of cutting-edge research, informed advocacy and trustworthy resources to help those with dyslexia reach their full potential. The Center's tools and resources are used widely by parents, educators and those with dyslexia to advocate for greater recognition and support for dyslexic children and adults. YCDC builds awareness in all communities and mobilizes grassroots efforts to close the reading achievement gap for low-income students of color through policies that help dyslexic children succeed. The Center also showcases the remarkable success stories of adults with dyslexia, including writers, scientists, celebrities and government and business leaders. For more information visit us at www.dyslexia.yale.edu

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FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND SCREENING TOOL ALLOWS FOR EARLY IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE DYSLEXIA - Yale Dyslexia

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Young Readers with Dyslexia Will be Identified Sooner and Receive Interventions and Accommodations Needed to Succeed in School CONTACT: Dr. Sally Shaywitz, sally.shaywitz@yale.edu Carmel Lepore, Carmel.lepore@yale.edu, (203) 785-4641 New Haven, Conn.

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Spelling is the red-headed stepchild of literacy instruction, derided as crazy and declared unimportant. Spelling lists are created with random unrelated words and taught via rote memorization techniques. Spelling is taught out of context and isolated from grammar, a disastrous combination for students with dyslexia and troublesome for many students without dyslexia. Of course, many students will learn to spell without a hitch, but does that make these practices OK?

Swap the letter wall for a phoneme wall

Almost every elementary school classroom has the alphabet on the wall. On each letter card is usually a picture of something that begins with the letter on the card. For example, the <a> is almost always accompanied by a picture of an apple, which is trying to convey that "<a> says /a/ like in apple." The problem is that /a/ is just one of many sounds that the grapheme <a> represents, so we are setting up students for confusion when they come to a word like awake.

The solution is to hang a phoneme wall, like the one that accompanies this post.

The beauty of this solution is that students can add words as they come up over the entire course of the year and they start to look for and notice sound options for graphemes.

Add a small, but important, qualifying word

In the letter wall example, I included the sentence "<a> says /a/ like in apple," but that sentence is misleading. We can add one simple word to that sentence to help children understand our spelling system better. Which word could have that much power? The word can. The sentence would then change to, "<a> can say /a/ like in apple."

Teach the story of the word

Remove the sentences "English is crazy" or "You just have to memorize these words" from your dialogue of teaching instruction. Instead, teach students there is a reason for every letter in every word and investigate that reason together. For example, instead of telling students that it is crazy to have an <l> in the word yolk, look at the story of the word and you will find out that the <l> is there to mark its connection to the color yellow, because yolk is yellow. So do you think students will remember the spelling because they understand the reason behind it or because they were told to memorize it? One great resource to help with sight words is Making Sense of Words That Don't.

Make spelling lists of related words

The bane of my existence is when I see a list of spelling words that looks something like this:

This list has words with different spelling conventions, different grammatical features, and apparently no relation. It makes no sense. What about a spelling list like this one?

On the surface, it looks like students are learning only two words, but in actuality (which is another word we could add to this list), students are learning the underlying structure of words. They are learning that every word has a base and an affix or affixes and that those affixes are connected to grammar. Students learn that action is act + ion, and reactivation is re + act + ive + ate + ion. They learn that the single silent <e> in the suffix <ate> is elided because of the vowel suffix that follows it. They learn that <ing> is an inflectional suffix that can make <act> a noun and an adjective and that the <ive> + <ate> can make the word a verb. How cool is that? With this information, students are able to find those patterns in thousands of other words.

Think about this for a minute: If you can spell a word you can read it, but being able to read a word does not guarantee you can spell it. That sentence could have profound implications for how we introduce literacy skills to our youngest children. Should we teach spelling (orthography) before reading?

Kelli Sandman-Hurley is the co-owner of the Dyslexia Training Institute. She received her doctorate in literacy with a specialization in reading and dyslexia from San Diego State University and the University of San Diego. She is a trained special education advocate assisting parents and children through the Individual Education Plan (IEP) and 504 Plan process. Kelli is an adjunct professor of reading, literacy coordinator, and a tutor trainer. Kelli is trained by a fellow of the Orton-Gillingham Academy and in the Lindamood-Bell, RAVE-O, and Wilson Reading Programs. Kelli is the past president of the San Diego Branch of the International Dyslexia Association, as well as a board member of the Southern California Library Literacy Network. She co-created and produced "Dyslexia for a Day: A Simulation of Dyslexia," is a frequent speaker at conferences, and is currently writing "Dyslexia: Decoding the System."

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Dyslexia and Spelling: The Chicken or the Egg?

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Spelling is the red-headed stepchild of literacy instruction, derided as crazy and declared unimportant. Spelling lists are created with random unrelated words and taught via rote memorization techniques. Spelling is taught out of context and isolated from grammar, a disastrous combination for students with dyslexia and troublesome for many students without dyslexia.

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Welcome

The IDA New Hampshire Branch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit scientific and educational organization serving Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. We educate the community about the causes, symptoms, assessment and remediation of dyslexia; disseminate information about available resources; teach multi-sensory structured language instructional approaches to educators and other professionals; and collaborate with organizations working on behalf of people with dyslexia.

IDA New Hampshire's mission is to serve as a local connection for the general public in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont as a gateway to the international community through the International Dyslexia Association regarding matters pertaining to individuals with dyslexia.

Audrey Burke
President
International Dyslexia Association
New Hampshire Branch

NHIDA has a passionate Board of Directors who donate their time, energy, and knowledge to promote public awareness and understanding of dyslexia and related disorders across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

We could not do any of this work without our members and the input from all who support us. Thank you all for your continued work with students, families and schools. We value your input and support.

Please help us spread the word about dyslexia.... feel free to share the following documents:
Please join our campaign of raising awareness and understanding about dyslexia.... Until everyone can read!
Featured Speaker for an OHIO annual Community Education Series in 2015.

Share this page with your friends...

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The IDA New Hampshire Branch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit scientific and educational organization serving Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. We educate the community about the causes, symptoms, assessment and remediation of dyslexia; disseminate information about available resources; teach multi-sensory structured language instructional approaches to educators and other professionals; and collaborate with organizations working on behalf of people with dyslexia.

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Overview

Product Details

Offering strong validity, reliability, and time savings, the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen is an excellent tool for early identification of individuals at risk for dyslexia.

Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen, developed by Dr. Sally Shaywitz, is a brief rating form of observed reading-related behaviors by teachers of children K-3, or by self-report in Corrections and for adolescents and adults. It was normed as part of a larger longitudinal study (the Connecticut Longitudinal Study) that began in 1983, and nationally validated by Pearson prior to publication. This collective research provides a strong evidence base for results you can trust.

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen emphasizes phonological, linguistic, and academic performance from teacher observations or, in the case of adolescents and adults, from self-ratings of past and current performance.

Benefits

Identify dyslexia risk quickly and easily administration in just a few minutes per rating.

Screen individuals or groups as well as individual and group reporting.

Easily interpret and communicate results using simple classifications (e.g., "At Risk for Dyslexia" or "Not At Risk for Dyslexia").

A teacher-friendly (K-3) or self-report (Adolescent-Adult/Corrections) rating form.

Digital administration and scoring, integrated with larger Pearson systems.

Good to Excellent levels of sensitivity, specificity, and AUC based on Sally and Bennett Shaywitz Connecticut Longitudinal Study and Pearson validation studies.

Provide support for families as they work on language-based skills critical for reading success.

Content & Features

Currently, the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen includes six individual forms across the age range. For Grades K-3 (Forms 0-3), a teacher completing Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen rates statements regarding a student's language and frequency of academic behaviors. For Adolescent-Adult and Corrections Forms, the individual self-rates. The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen includes four forms:

Form 0 is for teachers of students ages 5:0 through 6:11, typically in kindergarten, and consists of 10 items.

Form 1 is for teachers of students ages 6:0 through 7:11, typically in Grade 1, and consists of 12 items.

Form 2 is for teachers of students ages 7:0 through 8:11, typically in Grade 2, and consists of 10 items.

Form 3 is for teachers of students age 8:0 - 9:11, typically in Grade 3, and consists of 10 items.

The Adolescent-Adult Form is for individuals age 14-65 and consists of 10 items.

The Corrections Form is for incarcerated individuals age 18-65 and consists of 10 items.

Users & Applications

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen can be used by many different professionals and in various settings. Because of the nature of the screener, classroom teachers play a key role in completing forms and evaluating daily student skills and achievement in school settings. In addition, special education teachers, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, occupational therapists, reading specialists, educational diagnosticians, and other qualified professionals screen individuals for dyslexia.

Key applications for the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen include:

Universal screening, in compliance with state dyslexia screening mandates or strategic mass screening efforts

Targeted screening, where literacy benchmarks show overall academic risk in reading, or key at-risk populations can be screened

Individual screening, as part of an overall evaluation process or as a first step in evaluation or intervention planning

Psychometric Information

While many tools and resources may use the label "dyslexia screener," only those tools with appropriate psychometric rigor and process do so accurately. Read more.

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen was developed and normed initially with evidence from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study that Dr. Shaywitz began in 1983. Subsequently, Pearson completed additional validation studies in 2016 (Grades K and 1), 2017 (Grade 2), 2018 (Grade 3), and 2019 (Adolescent-Adult and Corrections).

Results from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study and the national validity studies provide substantial support for the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen. The test manuals include demographic breakdowns of each sample across grades as well as validity measures (e.g., portions of the WIAT-III®).

Tables 3.3, 3.6, 4.1 and 4.5 show reliability data and classification accuracy data, respectively, across forms.

Overcoming Dyslexia, Second Edition

Dr. Shaywitz has released a 2nd and completely updated edition of her well-known book, Overcoming Dyslexia. Review and purchase on Amazon.com or the publisher's website, Knopf Doubleday.

Want more updates from us? Stay in the know! or use our Contact Us form to find out how you might implement the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen in your organization.

Where is the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen available?

At this time, the screener is available in the United States, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, United Kingdom, and India. Please visit the country-specific Pearson websites for ordering information and customer support.

Sample Reports

Resources

The following resources are available for Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen.

FAQs

Select a question below to see the response.

General Questions

Should I use the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen more than one time for a student?

Yes. Many state laws require annual screening in early grades. In addition, screening annually in early years increases the power of the results of the screener over time.

When using the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen in Kindergarten, at what point during the school year should I screen?

In the manual, we recommend waiting at least 6-8 weeks from the start of the school year for any form of the screener, so that the teacher-rater has time to get to know the student academically and have enough classroom performance examples to rate confidently. More broadly, given the widely variable preschool experience of Kindergarten students, it may be advisable to wait longer into the school year, even after the mid-year break, to allow all students to have access to quality instruction prior to screening. Organizational factors and external constraints may also play a role in determining the best timing for this grade. Conversely, waiting too long in the Kindergarten year may miss the opportunity for more explicit and structured instruction in Kindergarten for students at risk for dyslexia. Balancing all these factors is key.

Can a teacher purchase the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen directly?

Schools and school districts are able to purchase this tool, as is our typical process. For individual purchases, users must be Level B qualified. Some teachers may be Level B qualified, some may not.

Dr. Shaywitz and Pearson agree that classroom teachers are those professionals closest to the student academically. They are the best responders to academic performance related to reading for this screener. When Dr. Shaywitz developed the screener based on her long-standing data set, she specifically crafted the items for teachers. She wanted the best evidence to come from teachers who can respond to questions about student performance in the classroom environment.

Administering a screening program includes identifying appropriate students to screen, whether a universal student population or a subset of students, and ensuring that the screening program is administered with fidelity. Those who administer screening programs also must train examiners appropriately, interpret results correctly within the limits of the scope of the screening tool, and disseminate results appropriately to various stakeholder groups. Those professionals who are trained in appropriate and ethical management of assessment tools are called, in Pearson terms, Level B qualified users. There are multiple scenarios in which a professional may be Level B qualified. Please refer to our user qualifications page on our website. Both Dr. Shaywitz and Pearson are committed to our ethical responsibility that tools we publish are used appropriately, on behalf of students and their families.

Recommendations about what to do next following screening require a collaborative approach between professionals from different disciplines and often across general and special education perspectives.

Why are the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen forms named "Form 0, Form 1, etc." and not by grade (e.g., The Kindergarten Form)?

Great question. Around the world, each grade and the expectations of student performance vary. As we publish the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen in other countries, we needed to give each country the flexibility to assign the appropriate grade level to each form, based on the local education system and the local research on the screener.

Content Questions

Are the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen results valid for children who are young or old for grade?

The results for children who are considered "out of level" are not necessarily invalid and may be interpreted by qualified practitioners. If a child's age is outside the typical age range associated with his or her grade level, Q-global alerts the user by providing a message window entitled, "Invalid Assessment Record(s)." The error message indicates the age levels typically associated with the form and advises the use of caution when interpreting results.

Can you comment on the perceived age of the original norm sample and the sample size of the national validation studies?

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen utilizes a cut score norm, which provides a reference point for each form to divide the data set into two groups: At Risk for Dyslexia and Not At Risk for Dyslexia. The teacher ratings must exceed the cut score in order to classify a student as At Risk for Dyslexia.

Unlike traditional normative samples that must be sufficiently large and representative of the population to establish a normal distribution of scores, a cut score norm only requires a representative sample of the two target groups: in this case, students who are At Risk for Dyslexia and Not At Risk for Dyslexia. The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen cut scores are based on a sample of 414 schoolchildren who participated in the Connecticut Longitudinal Study that began in 1983 and continues to the present day. In contrast to traditional normative samples that are collected within one year or less, the Shaywitz normative sample has been followed over three decades from school entry into early adulthood. The longitudinal research design has allowed Dr. Shaywitz to detect measurable changes in reading performance and risk classification over the course of each student's academic career, strengthening the reliability and validity of the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen risk classification in the early grades.

To confirm that the cut scores remain valid and reliable across samples, 115 children between the ages of 5 and 7 participated in a national validity study in April through July 2016. For the kindergarten and grade 1 forms, 115 students (i.e., 50+ at each grade) offered the statistical power needed for the psychometric analysis of the data set. The results of this national validity study indicated that the reliability coefficients and clinical sensitivity and specificity results were similar to those derived from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study. These findings support the use of the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen for identifying children with dyslexia and suggest that the teacher ratings that indicate risk for dyslexia remain consistent over time. Additional Grade 2 and Grade 3 validation studies were conducted in 2017 and 2018, respectively, in the same way with similar results.

Does the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen include a measure of rapid automatic naming (RAN) or family history?

Certainly, individuals with dyslexia often have family members with similar (but not always) struggles in reading, writing, and/or spelling related to dyslexia. Further, many individuals, through an assessment process, show lower than average performance on one or more RAN tasks.

That said, the data set behind the screener did not provide the evidence strength needed to include items related to these two areas in the screener itself. In addition, family history may not always be available and therefore makes it difficult to require in a screening process.

Should students who are English Language Learners (ELLs) also be screened for dyslexia?

Yes. Dyslexia is not language-specific; it crosses alphabetic and logographic writing systems. Further, a screener does not diagnose. The goal of any screener is to sort reliably individuals who are "at risk" vs. those who are "not at risk." Any positive classification of "At Risk for Dyslexia" on the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen, whether from a student who is also classified as ELL or not, should be followed by a secondary measure or measures to establish whether or not the student actually has dyslexia. In the case of a student who is an ELL, if dyslexia exists generally it will present in English and in the student's primary language(s), depending on the language(s) and age of the student. View Dyslexia & ELLs

In the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, did teachers have training in dyslexia?

The Connecticut Longitudinal Study focused on a cohort of hundreds of children, not teachers. The study followed, and continues to follow, this cohort of children into adulthood. The study, as part of its protocol, gathered data from teachers who may or may not have had specific training on dyslexia--it simply asked questions of teachers of these children in the cohort about the nature of each child's academic and classroom performance, which any teacher can do once they have time in the classroom to observe a student's work. In addition, each year a full assessment battery was also given to each child in the cohort.

The Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen items were derived from an empirical analysis of teacher response data and assessment scores over time. Then, the screeners' items were field tested by a range of classroom teachers, who also had a wide spectrum of knowledge regarding dyslexia--no formal dyslexia training was provided by the study over the years nor during the field testing of the items. In fact, the items were designed to be completed by teachers who had very little or no understanding of dyslexia. While training in dyslexia is not required or necessary for a teacher to complete the screener, Dr. Shaywitz and Pearson clearly advocate for the training of all teachers in the science of dyslexia.

Experts I've read define dyslexia as word level reading difficulties but average or better than average language skills. Word reading skills, reading fluency and reading comprehension are substantially below the student's language comprehension skills. If language is strong, how can dyslexia be a language-based disorder?

The issue of strengths and weaknesses in a profile of dyslexia is such an important topic! The evidence is clear that reading is primarily a language-based effort, as opposed to a purely cognitive/metacognitive effort, for example. The tasks of word-level decoding and reading comprehension (i.e., tasks of written language) require a number of linguistic skills to accomplish--knowledge of sounds, letters, and words/word parts, which are all part of the linguistic code and together carry the meaning needed for comprehension. A recent article by Hugh Catts and colleagues describes students with dyslexia who have strong *oral (*i.e., semantic or phonological) language skills (seen as a "protective factor") and students with dyslexia who have weak *oral *language skills (seen as a "risk factor"). An example of low oral language skills might be students who receive preschool speech-language services for oral language skill development and then ended up being diagnosed with dyslexia once into elementary school. They may not have average or better oral language skills at the time of the dyslexia diagnosis. In fact, their risk for dyslexia could have been predicted much sooner--not just with oral language performance, but along with other factors in a hybrid model--than a typical 3rd grade dyslexia assessment. So while dyslexia is indeed a language-based disorder, the profile of language skills among those with dyslexia is not homogeneous.

Here's a link to the Catts, et al abstract, if you are interested: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-016-9692-2

Can't teachers skew the results by selecting the frequency that will automatically yield an at-risk rating, making this not a valid indicator of risk for dyslexia?

Unfortunately, any professional making erroneous or inaccurate ratings to positively or negatively influence the outcome of an assessment is nothing new in the world of testing. This would be an ethical violation in the use of tests and test content under a professional code of ethics.

Beyond the psychometric and research evidence, the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen items were developed based on direct teacher feedback and support to create the clearest and easiest way possible to rate student performance. Supporting Teacher Guides further illustrate the use of the item's content. The validity and reliability data are accurate and defensible. All assessments, including all rating scales like this screener, have a margin of error factored into the responses of those who complete the forms.

Further, administrators of a screening program can provide a check and balance. Prevalence data from the literature and our own research have confirmed that up to 20% of a typical school classroom could be flagged as "at risk" for dyslexia. If a class percentage of risk status is higher than that, it may require follow-up to understand why the risk status was higher. This is a powerful use of the group report, if it is needed.

Finally, the power of this tool is in its ability to function as a mass triage system--you cast a wide net and gather students who may be at risk. The value is in the combination of speed and breadth for finding students at younger grades faster than is typical in the world of education to date. Certainly, a few students who are flagged as "at risk" will end up not having dyslexia upon further assessment. They may need something else, or nothing beyond excellent Tier 1/general education instruction. This is just step 1 of the overall "find and serve those with dyslexia" effort.

Technical Questions

Which Administration Delivery Option should I choose: Q-global, the PearsonScreen application, or aimswebPlus?

If you are already a Q-global user and want to screen a single student or a small group of students, Q-global is your best choice. If, however, you are planning to screen a percentage of students across a grade or literally screen every student in the grade, then you want to choose the PearsonScreen application or aimswebPlus, which will give you both mass screening capabilities--including administrator dashboards, teacher progress indicators, and rostering support--and robust and flexible reporting tools for aggregated and disaggregated reporting across the district.

How can I implement the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen on Review360?

Use the PDFs below to guide you through the getting started and screening process. Select the documents that are best suited to your needs: K-12 organizations or non-education organizations.
K-12 Education Organizations Non-K-12 Organizations

Webinars

The following training events are available for Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen.

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Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen™ is an efficient, reliable, and user-friendly dyslexia test for K‐3 students who may be at risk for reading difficulties. NEW Adolescent-Adult Form and Corrections Form information available in Product Details. Guidance on using this test in your telepractice.

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An Interview...

Remember to click on Note: any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.
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(see ' Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.

Point of View:

David Boulton: To begin with, help us understand your passion and point of view.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: All right. I'm a neuroscientist, but a pediatrician by training. My interest in trying to better understand learning disabilities, and particularly reading difficulties, came from my own experience as a resident, seeing many, many children and their families. I became aware of how worried mothers and fathers were about how their children were doing in school, and, also, how little we, particularly pediatricians, knew about it, and had to offer these families. Since that time I chose to not only be a pediatrician, but to specialize in developmental and behavioral pediatrics, and then further in learning disabilities, and then further in reading.

Over the years I've really gotten to know so many children and their families, and also I've seen the children grow up and got to know them as adolescents and young adults and even adults. I have seen the tremendous cost to these children and their families of having reading problems that often were unidentified and misunderstood and inadequately treated.

David Boulton: So, you connected up with and empathized with the challenges they're living through in some way that drew you in.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Oh, absolutely. As a neuroscientist I feel privileged to be studying the brain, but I think the passion that drives my husband and me, we work together, is really the knowledge and experience of what the cost is to individuals. It's an enormous, enormous cost and because it seems to be hidden, as I say in my book " Hidden only from those who don't have to live with it."It's frequently terribly misunderstood. Children who are struggling to read, are often told, "Well, you're not motivated," or, "You're not trying hard enough." Or if a parent is concerned, that parent might be told, "Oh, you're just worrying, don't worry, they'll outgrow the problem." The idea that this is somehow a phase rather than something that will be with the child for life.

David Boulton: Yes. One of our interests is to explore what happens when children become so ashamed of how they feel about themselves in this process that it creates an almost preconscious aversion to it.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, I think that's true. I've had the good fortune to speak to many people who are dyslexic, and who've been highly successful by anyone's standards. But if you speak to them, as I have, and you ask them: " Well, what was it like for you when you were a child, particularly, what was school like?" And you see this terrible look on their face. Particularly they recall the really horrible experience of being called upon to read aloud in class, in front of everyone when they couldn't do it.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's the kind of mental image and emotional experience that stays with a child. It's really remarkable how many adults will remember that and can picture that classroom and how they felt and how they wanted to get out of there and avoid that at all costs.

David Boulton: Right. Almost everyone we talk to speaks about this feeling level connection with people who are suffering with this challenge.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Yes, this isn't an academic abstraction, it's about real people who have to live with something that people don't see, and that's why I guess it's been a really wonderful thing that the science has progressed so far, and that we actually now have the ability to see the brain at work, so we can actually see what is happening at the most basic levels.

What Brain Scans Reveal:

David Boulton: Good. Thank you. That's a great place to start from. Relative to what you were just saying about being able to see the brain working on these fundamental levels, tell me a little bit about your research model, what you've been looking for and how you've gone about it.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, clearly, for anyone who's interested in reading and dyslexia, which was initially described over a hundred years ago, the goal has been to try to understand where, at a fundamental level, reading takes place; and obviously it takes place in the brain. However, the challenge has been how do you study a process within the brain of children who are otherwise healthy? Fortunately, we have a very nice hard skull protecting the brain. So, how do you look within the brains of healthy children? We've all been extraordinarily fortunate that two lines of research have converged. One is the understanding of the basic nature of reading and reading difficulties; and the other has been the extraordinary progress in technology that allows us in really quite a benign way to be able to image the brain at work. We use Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which allows us to image children and adults as they try to read without using radiation or injections or anything like that.

So, our first goal was to see if the technology could work, and to be able to identify and localize what are the brain systems used in reading. First we studied adults, good and poor readers. We found that good readers use three major systems on the left side of the brain. Then we found that poor readers had a disruption, a significant underactivation of two of the regions in the back of the brain. But when you see that, the question always is: Is this something that if you see it in an adult, is it the result of years and years of not reading?

David Boulton: Right, or mis-learning to read, as distinct from being something that's more neurobiological/structural in origin?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, yes - not quite, maybe having not read... I'll get to something in a moment, and you'll see why I'm sort of hedging here.

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Anyway, so our next step was to study a very, very large group of children who were good readers and struggling readers, and we found exactly what we had found in the adults, a significant underactivation in the areas in the back of the brain. This study was really a very, very informative one because there was an unusually large number of children participating, 144. That is a very large number of children for an imaging study and that allowed us to do a number of things. It allowed us to begin to map out: Well, what do these areas do? What was particularly of interest to us was one of the areas - have you seen my book?

David Boulton: I have it in front of me.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: The area in the back of the brain, the left occipital temporal region, or the word forming area - activation in that area was significantly related to a child's skill as a reader. So, the individual differences in reading skills were related to individual differences in brain activation. That was very important, because this is a very important area in fluency, which is critical to being able to read not only accurately, but also rapidly and with good intonation. So, we went from simply geographically identifying the systems to being able to see the locations of potential differences between good and poor readers, and what the role of each of these systems is.

Connecticut Longitudinal Study:

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Then we were able to go even one step further. I directed a study called the Connecticut Longitudinal Study. This study has been ongoing since 1983, where we've followed an epidemiologic sample of Connecticut school children. The target population was to reflect and be representative of all children attending public kindergarten in the state of Connecticut.

We've now followed and continue to follow ninety percent of that group, so they're now in their mid- twenties. We gave them reading tests every year and every other year ability tests; asked their teachers about them, asked the families about themselves, asked the children how they felt about themselves. It's a very broad range of information about the children.

What we were able to do as a result of that is when this group was in their early twenties a few years ago, identify three groups: one group who had never had a reading problem; one group who seemed to early on, in third and fourth grade, have a reading problem, but by the time they were in ninth grade, have really good accuracy, but still not fluent; and the third group, who we call persistently poor readers, they were poor readers in third grade and in ninth grade.

When we imaged them - I'll make what could be a long story very short - we found that the worst readers, the persistently poor readers, had the systems for reading in place, but they'd never been properly activated. They weren't connected up the same way as good readers. More importantly, because we had data on these young people from the time they entered school, we knew about their families and schools. What we found was that the persistently poor readers seemed to have lower verbal ability from the beginning and to attend more disadvantaged schools than the group that had compensated.

That has led us to hypothesize that we may be dealing with two different types of poor readers: one type, which would represent about a third of the total group of poor readers, who had their reading problems on an inherent basis. The other, which would represent two-thirds of the poor readers, seemed to have the systems for reading intact, but they'd never been properly activated. So these were shown primarily as environmental influences, perhaps from growing up in more disadvantaged circumstances and from not having received the kinds of reading instruction that would properly activate these systems.

Again, this is not to just to be simplistic and think that it's either all genetic or all environmental.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: With every child it's always a combination. But in each child, also, there's a predominance of one or the other. What's very hopeful is that this large group representing two-thirds of all poor readers are children who really could be helped, who have the systems intact, who don't have that kind of disruption, but really haven't that that kind of stimulation either at home or at school that would allow these systems to be properly activated.

Limitations of Current Brain Scans:

David Boulton: Do we have any brain imaging tests that you're aware of that allow us to see a signature distinction in the structure or processing of the brain before the process of learning to read that predicts difficulty in learning to read?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: We don't. I know exactly what you're saying, and that would be just a really commendable goal. Currently, when we do functional brain imaging, children have to lie very still, and the youngest that I think we or others have done is about six-and-a-half. So then at that time that would be when children are about near the end of kindergarten. So, you'd expect them to have the rudiments of early reading in place.

It may be possible, with other technologies that are evolving, to be able to identify children earlier.

David Boulton: So, currently there's a rather significantly sized uncertainty about that threshold.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.

David Boulton: Okay. Relative to your tests, how fast a frequency variation can you see? I mean, for example, with Keith Rayner's work we're seeing that the difference between graphemic and phonological follow-up is happening in a five to twenty-five millisecond time window when somebody is reading well.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining doesn't give temporal information.

David Boulton: So, then difficulties associated with the time precarious interactive interplay between these various modules you're identifying can't be seen with the equipment and setups we've got yet.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Certainly not with the Functional MRI. But what we can see, for example, that when we present words to children very quickly if they are using the word formation area that's critical for fluent reading. That's possible.

Now there are new techniques that show how the parts of the brain are connected, so we can have a sense - and that's what I was just telling you about in the last research I mentioned, where we looked at the persistently poor readers who seemed to have all the systems in place, but they weren't connected appropriately, they weren't connected properly. I think this is an area where the technology is evolving very, very rapidly, so I think things are really changing as we speak.

David Boulton: So, we're heading towards being able to peer into this space. It seems when children are reading, if we really track their facial expressions and articulations, there's a hesitancy, or starting and stopping that happens for struggling readers, and that that starting and stopping has a correspondence to a number of things. One thing for sure is the kind of ambiguity they're processing at that moment, yes?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, yes, I think each of us would represent that a little bit differently.

David Boulton: Okay.

The Challenge of Learning to Read:

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: To us, when we think of how children learn to read, children first, you know, obviously learn the letters and the sounds. Then they learn strategies to sound out words. When they're doing that, that's still laborious. It demands attention.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: After they've read a word correctly a number of times - no one knows exactly how many times, some people think four or six, and it probably varies for each child - but have read a word over and over again correctly - and that's the key, correctly - then that the word becomes automatic, and they just need to look at it and they automatically recognize it. That's where that occipital temporal region becomes involved. So it's really that occipital temporal region that is critical because it's that same ventral stream on the left side of the brain. So this particular area on the left side of the brain, the word forming area, is the area that we and others believe serves the expertise in reading. That's very, very important because when you can read a word fluently it's read automatically. That means you don't have to devote conscious attention to it. And unless you can read words fluently, you're not going to enjoy reading.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: It's hard work. That why I think so many people misunderstand what a struggling reader is all about. It's not that they can't read. That may happen, but it's very rare. But it's how much effort they have to put into it.

David Boulton: The bandwidth they're consuming to do the processing to get to that level of fluency that can allow them to run.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.

David Boulton: Which comes back to the point that there's certain processing involved. In order to get to a point where there's the automatic recognition that you're describing, they need to develop the skills that will allow them to work out a word they haven't previously encountered.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: It's in that process, how well they learn to work out a word that's confusing them, and how fast they're able to do that that's at the core of whether or not this whole thing smoothes out and becomes transparent enough.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right. I don't know if I would use those exact words, but I would agree with the idea.

David Boulton: Okay. So there's a time that it takes to work it out that's associated with creating a phonological experience of the word they're reading, yes?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, yes, a phonologic model that's able to transform the letters into the sounds the letters have to represent.

David Boulton: And in the course of doing that, as we know, there's this very ambiguous - to the child, anyway - relationship between the letters and the sounds, that their brain has to work out.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Oh, absolutely. When I lecture, what I always say is: That's the whole challenge in reading. The spoken language is not a challenge, because it's natural, it's been with us forever, it's been certainly hundreds and thousands of years. We as human beings are genetically programmed and our brains are hardwired for spoken language; whereas written language, from an evolutionary perspective, anyway, is much newer.

Unnatural Challenge:

David Boulton: Okay. One of the things that our project starts off with is the distinction between oral language and written language. With oral language, depending on which expert, 50,000 to a million years old, whether you go genetics or...

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: How can anyone know? There's no way that we know exactly when we began.

David Boulton: No, but we do know from facial anthropological structural shifts when we became capable of more rapid articulate speech.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right, but that's still a big window.

David Boulton: Yes, it's still a big window, but as you pointed out just a few moments ago, there's a big difference between the time we've had to adapt to speaking and listening...

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right, exactly.

David Boulton: And the time that we've had to adapt to writing and reading. I mean, only a few percent of Mesopotamia and Egypt could read, and during the Dark Ages, only a few percent of Europeans. English as a written standard for mass writing and reading is only a few hundred years old.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's correct.

David Boulton: The English code, in particular, is a fusion of the sound system of Latin and the letter system of Latin with the sound system of English. It has very confusing letter-sound level correspondence ambiguities that takes time for the brain to work through, and that time has some correspondence to the stuttering that we experience or see in the processing that children are going through that are struggling. Yes?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Go ahead. I'm listening.

Education and Science:

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: As I said, I'm a physician, and this month I've been taking care of sick children in the hospital. When we make our morning rounds and we talk about what treatments to use, we always look to the evidence, you know, what is the evidence that for a treatment - treatment A versus treatment B - we look at the scientific literature. What is to me extraordinary, truly astonishing, is that in education, that's never been part of the culture. What is chosen - what books are chosen, or programs, really reflect a philosophy, or what publishers tell people - lots of different things, but not true science.

David Boulton: Well, there seems to be a rather assumption-based war that goes on between some different interpretations of how human beings learn in general, and learn to read in particular. There are people, and I've talked to some of them, who firmly believe that given enough success, the kids will pick up the code processing skills without needing to be explicitly conducted through learning them.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right. Because there are people who inherently believe that you can treat cancer by an extract from apricot pits.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: We need more than beliefs, we need to show evidence.

David Boulton: Right. And we need to reframe - we need to challenge the assumptions in an environment, situation and setting where they can actually be approached by the people that are holding them.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, that's right. You need to do a scientific study, and you've got to have a hypothesis, and come up with a hypothesis that can be challenged, that can be falsified.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Because science has a real process. What's really been extraordinary, is in the last several years we've really had a cultural and a paradigm shift where the very basic tenets of science have entered into education. That's very hard, because it's not been part of the culture.

I've sat in meetings with educators in New York City, where there's the huge issue of how to teach children how to read. I sit and I listen, and I think, well, what is the problem here? These people are intelligent people. Then it struck me that the whole notion of science and what that implies and the process, and how you validate something is foreign to them. It's not the fault of these individuals, it's just not the way they were taught. People who've come through schools of education and wherever else they've trained, the scientific process has just not been part of the conversation.

Secret Shame:

David Boulton: Well, we've been interviewing a number of people on the adult literacy and juvenile justice sides to get a triangulation on two levels: the shame aversion and the hiding that goes on. Robert Wedgeworth at ProLiteracy described a recent adult literacy studies in which what they found to be the most striking correlation in the buying behavior of people that are challenged with respect to reading, is the extraordinary degrees they go to hide it.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Oh, absolutely.

David Boulton: It just goes to show us again how powerfully locked up this is with shame.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Oh, absolutely. To give another example - I think it would be very important for people, though, in your project to make sure that people can understand how very bright and sometimes very successful people can have this. Some of the most distinguished professors or our best students will come and ask to speak to me. This has happened so often now that my assistant knows, and she'll lead them into my office, and they'll look around to make sure no one can hear, close the door, and then will say, "I have to tell you something. You're not going to believe it. And no one knows this about me." Then I know exactly what they're going to say, you know, what a terrible reader they are, or how slow they read, or how long it takes them. They're filled with shame and they think they're the only one who has this. I say, "Well, you know, I've seen many of your colleagues." I don't mention who they are. They say, "Really? I can't believe that." They think they've somehow fooled people. (More "shame stories")

David Boulton: Yes. That's such a powerful piece. The other thing that very few people get that's connected to this is more at the processing level, that the more that shame accumulates the easier it is to trigger.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.

David Boulton: And the moment that it triggers it sucks up bandwidth, that diminishes their brain's capacity to process the code.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, that's right. That's right. That's why it's so critical to try to reach children really early.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Because it's just an extraordinary thing, and how it affects people in every walk of life. I hope you will show some highly successful people talking about it.

David Boulton: We will.

Dyslexia Numbers:

David Boulton: I'm really enjoying this and could go for a lot longer but I want to hold to the hour that I asked for. You've been attributing that up to twenty percent of the population has or could have dyslexia.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right.

David Boulton: When we talked with Reid Lyon and James Wendorf, they're very clear in the way that they frame it, coming at it from two different but correlated angles, that only about five to six percent of children, according to all of their studies and information, have anything that might be considered neurobiological in origin that's impeding their learning to read; that for ninety-five percent of the children that are in various stages of struggle, that struggle has to do with how it is we are meeting them, teaching them, unfolding this before them; and that as a consequence, if we take your twenty and overlay it on that, there's a kind of a definitional confusion.

Are you saying that twenty percent have an inherent problem with dyslexia, or that what we call dyslexia, which is such a general and broad term, stretches across twenty percent, part of which is neurobiological and part of which is instructional?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's an empiric question. We don't know the answer to that. But if I were to come down on it, I would say that it would be just what we reported when I was telling you about the two-thirds and one-third. So I would, I think...

David Boulton: Basically, that actually brings it right back into alignment, right?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: Okay. That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure we explicitly went through that loop together.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right. And we don't know. That's why we're carrying out genetic studies, to really see the differences.

David Boulton: They've backed into their five to six percent numbers; they're not bottoms-up, right?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I don't know where they - I think they got their number because what's been shown is if you give children highly effective, evidence-based intervention you can bring down the number of struggling readers to five to seven percent.

David Boulton: Right. But that's what I mean, they've backed into saying how many people might have neurobiological problems.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Yes.

David Boulton: Because they can't see them directly, they're inferring them from how many people they can help inside the box of what they can offer.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I think what you said is correct. [laughter]

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I think so, because what's nice is it all overlaps; what I'm saying and what they're saying really comes to the same thing, essentially.

David Boulton: Right. And I think there was enough potential for confusion here that I wanted to get more explicit in that space.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Glad we clarified that.

David Boulton: Yes.

Slow Readers Need More Time:

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I don't know if you want to get into it or not, because it's probably a little different than what your primary focus is on, but a very important thing is children grow up to be adolescents and young adults, and whatever they want to aspire to be, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a writer, they often have to take a series of tests. One of the things we know is that because children who struggle to read don't develop that left word forming area that's responsible for being able to read more fluently, they read very slowly and require extra time.

That becomes a really important thing because so many children who've worked so hard all their lives, they come to the point where they need to take an SAT or an ALSED Law School Admissions Test or a GRE, and they require extra time if they're going to be able to show what they know. There's been a very strong - it's not a movement, I don't know the right word - but these children are more and more being denied the extra time that they require.

David Boulton: There's this general failure in the way that we think about assessment to actually meet the kids in some way that reflects what their situation is.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right, not to feel that they're somehow getting away with something or weak. If somebody needs glasses, you wouldn't question it, or if a diabetic needs insulin, in the same we know that children or young adults and adults who have reading problems require extra time. For me, as a physician and as a scientist, one of the most exciting things has been that we've been able to now demonstrate that in children who are dyslexic, they don't develop that word forming area but they do develop compensatory regions on the right side of the brain and also in the front that allow them to read. But not automatically so that they can become highly accurate readers, but by the investment of an extraordinary amount of time and energy. They can get there, but their route is much slower and more inefficient.

David Boulton: Right. There's some kind of a circuit detour that's had to happen for them.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: Which is slower in processing and results in them needing more time to be as effective in the task.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right. What I say now is that dyslexia simply robs a person of time, accommodations like extra time return part of it, and that a person who is dyslexic has as much a physiologic need for extra time as a diabetic needs for insulin.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Now that we can show that with our brain imaging, that's made an extraordinary difference. Because I've seen too many young people who were applying to graduate school or professional school who struggled their lives to reach the point where they can read accurately, but not automatically, are turned down for extra time. It's like somebody climbing to the top of a mountain and you suddenly step on their fingers, and don't let them take that last step, and knock them down. So, it may not sound like an important thing to you, but for all those people who have had difficulty reading it is.

David Boulton: All of these dimensions are critical. We're looking at the family context, the social context, very particularly at the emotional affective context as well as the cognitive processing challenge.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's at the very - that's at the heart.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's the heart and soul of it. Because you can teach a person to read, and you can do all the things, but if they've had that hurt and that pain and that blow to their self-esteem, that's the most difficult. We have no medicine for that.

David Boulton: Yes. And it's not just a bad feeling they're having; it's fundamentally processing-level debilitating, draining of the efficiency that's necessary to process the thing that could make them feel better. It works in a downward spiral.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That's right.

In Closing:

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, it sounds like - I'm feeling good speaking to you because it sounds like you really care.

David Boulton: I really care. This is my life work. I am totally focused on this all the time.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, I'm glad, because it's my life's work.

David Boulton: Yes. I feel like we've met each other well. I look forward to meeting you in person and interviewing you on camera for the documentary. I really applaud and congratulate you for all that you've done that's helping so many children.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I think what you are doing and will complete, and I guess continue to do, will really have an enormous impact.

David Boulton: Yes, thank you. I hope so. We've done interviews with people ranging from the man who discovered the basic principles of the emergence of the Standard English, and orthography experts like Venezky, and people that studied the emergence of writing with the Hebrews, Phoenicians and Greeks and the fall of letter-sound correspondence. We have also interviewed Pat Lindamood and Nanci Bell, Paula Tallal, and other people working on the circuitry of sound, and then Keith Rayner on visual perception, and Keith Stanovich and others. We're trying to bring together a matrix that will allow people to really understand how all these things connect. We've got to reframe how we think about all of this.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Well, that will be wonderful. But how long a documentary are you going to make?

David Boulton: The broadcast documentary will be three hours long, but there will be a ten-hour extended DVD for teachers and professionals.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Isn't that wonderful.

David Boulton: Yes, so it'll go from the beginning of oral language and the brain - did you ever read Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species?

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Yes.

David Boulton: I really enjoyed conversations with him.

So we'll go from the development of language and its effect on consciousness, to the emergence of writing, the breakdown of phonetic correspondence - remember in Plato's day, the letters and sounds were the same - and up to the challenge of today. We will visit the history of attempts to fix the code as well as the reading wars. We want to dispel the myths about the code and get down to the fact that learning to use it is a technological process - like learning to program a remote control or use a machine. It's a virtual reality machine. Our children are f eeling ashamed of being confused because of the way we're contextualizing and helping them through the confusions caused by our technology.

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Dr. Sally Shaywitz - The Brain and Dyslexia

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Dr. Sally Shaywitz, author of "Overcoming Dyslexia", is a neuroscientist who is passionately dedicated to helping children and families overcome the pain and strain of reading difficulties.

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There's no such thing as a "normal brain." In fact, there's a lot of diversity in how different brains process information -- a challenge for educators tasked with teaching a diverse group of learners. Dyslexia is a common variation that affects how kids read, but what's really going inside the brain of someone affected by it? Kelli Sandman-Hurley's TED-Ed video explains.

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What's Going On Inside A Dyslexic Student's Brain? | KQED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's no such thing as a "normal brain." In fact, there's a lot of diversity in how different brains process information -- a challenge for educators tasked with teaching a diverse group of learners. Dyslexia is a common variation that affects how kids read, but what's really going inside the brain of someone affected by it?

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Two years ago my life changed with a cocktail napkin at a dyslexia conference in Baltimore. I spent two days listening to Peter Bowers, the founder of The WordWorks Literacy Centre in Ontario, Canada, and Gina Cooke, the author of the blog LEX: Linguist-Educator Exchange, in the booth next to me, talking to dozens of people about something that just sounded like "another program for those with dyslexia."

But after two days, I figured all those people talking to Peter and Gina with such newfound enthusiasm must be on to something. I turned to Peter and said, in my most skeptical voice, "Okay, tell me what all this hullabaloo is about." He simply wrote the word "sign" down on a napkin and then created this word sum for me:
sign + al = signal
Then he asked me what I noticed about the "g" in the new word. That's when it hit me: The word "sign" is not a sight word. The "g" is there to mark its connection to "signal," "signature," and "resign." In fact, there is no such thing as a sight word. English makes sense.

We'll get to specific classroom strategies in a moment, but it's important, first, to look at the foundation for "real spelling."

Decades ago, both Carol Chomsky (in the Harvard Educational Review in 1970) and Richard Venezky (in Reading Research Quarterly in 1967 and The American Way of Spelling in 1999) put forth very informative and compelling reasons for teaching the English language the way it was meant to be understood. Their description of English spelling offered educators everything we needed to know to dispel the rampant misunderstanding in classrooms everywhere, that the written language is supposed to be a sound/symbol representation, and that any word that deviates from this belief is an "exception" or a "red, sight, or crazy" word that just needs to be memorized. They explained grapheme/phoneme understanding is still critically important to understanding the language, but we cannot possibly know how a word will be pronounced (or read) until we know how it appears within a grammatical and morphological context. Venezky said, "...the simple fact is that the present orthography is not merely a letter-to-sound system riddled with imperfections, but, instead, a more complex and more regular relationship wherein phoneme and morpheme share leading roles."

I was starting to notice an underlying structure of English and was ready to take on some more of my long-held assumptions about English orthography. I analyzed more word sums and found the true suffix is the Latinate "-ion," not "-tion" and "-sion." Here is an easy word to illustrate this orthographic fact: the word "action" has the base "act" and the suffix "-ion" which is illustrated in this word sum: "act" + "-ion" à action. If we suggest the hypothesis is that the suffix is "-tion" and put it into a word sum to test that hypothesis, we get "ac" + "-tion" and I realized that "ac" cannot be the base. The base has to be "act," and therefore the suffix has to be "-ion." With this new information I could then build a matrix for a whole family of words related in meaning and spelling to the base "act," but like "sign," the base had different pronunciations depending on what suffix was added!

Shown here is a word matrix to help illustrate the concept (created with the free mini-matrix maker):

In this one matrix the student would have learned the grapheme "t" can represent different pronunciations depending on its place in a word. Think "actual" and "acting." With this one matrix a student understands 23 words and the underlying principle of "-ion" which makes hundreds of other words available to them.

Now, back to the "-ion" suffix. Would it not be a better approach to teach all students- including those with dyslexia how the language works rather than having them guess which one says /ʒən/ and which one says /ʃən/ For argument's sake, try this word on for size: the word "tension" is represented in a word sum as "tense/" + "-ion" à tension. The single silent "e" is replaced by the vowel suffix "-ion." It's a simple suffixing pattern. Some students understand this logic more easily and are able to understand it early, given the opportunity.

In the case of students with dyslexia, orthographic instruction still responds to the need for morphophonemic awareness, it responds to the explicitness needed, it is multisensory and, best of all, it accomplishes our goal with a boatload of rhyme and reason along with enough critical thinking to make the Common Core authors jump for joy.

Homophones Set the Tone

Introducing the concept that spelling is meaning-based versus sound-based can be accomplished with an introduction to homophones. The homophones <see> and <sea> are a great place to start. I simply write the words down next to each other and ask the student to announce the word, which means they tell me the letter names, not the sounds they 'make' and they do not try to sound out the word, they only tell me the letters in the words. Once they verbally announce the letters they are then prompted to pronounce the words. If they are unable to do so, I tell them the word. I then ask them to analyze each word and tell me if they are spelled the same. Once they identify that the spellings are different, I then ask them what each word means. Finally, they hypothesize why they think the words are spelled differently despite being pronounced the same. Students, including students with dyslexia, understand that they are spelled differently because they mean different things. Bingo...they understand the concept. This is also a jumping off point to point out that we already see two different graphemes <ee> and <ea> that can represent the /e/ phoneme.

My student is then encouraged to keep a list of homophones learned as he or she encounters them. Other homophones that can be used for this introductory activity are: hear/here, to/too/two, where/wear. Each pair has a rich etymological history that you can investigate with your student to find out why they are spelled differently.

Teach Grapheme/Phoneme Options

We should not say, <f> says /f/ like in fun. First of all, letters do not talk. Secondly, students need to understand that most phonemes can be represented by more than one grapheme and /f/ is the perfect example. We often teach phonemes by targeting just one grapheme that represents it. So, if we want to target the /f/ phoneme, we might use words starting with <f> and say something like, "<f> is for /f/ like in <fun>." But given that instruction, what is a child supposed to make of words like <laugh> or <phone>? One option is to simply say, "One way of writing /f/ is with <f>." That may spark children to ask "What are some other ways?" You could then share words like <leaf>, <fun>, <knife> and <phone>, <graph> and <rough>, <laugh> and use them to investigate three ways of writing /f/. In this way, the child is not taught in such a way to think that words like <laugh> and <phone> are "tricky." Studying spellings becomes an investigation not memorization and this particularly important for students with dyslexia who are already using extra cognitive effort to read and spell. Students can create sound option charts. They add to the chart as they investigate and encounter new words. Below is an example of a sound option chart for the phoneme /f/:

The student finds the words for the sound option chart by looking through literature or simply adding the words as they notice them. This is a living document and students will continuously add new words. For students with dyslexia, this creates a sense of organization and predictability they need. (For more in-depth activities, visit Beyond the Word.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg-and I mean the very tip. If I had 10 more pages, I would just be getting started. I hope you had at least one aha moment and I hope this has left you with many questions or motivated you to learn more to become more fluent in English orthography and teaching orthography. For published research on this understanding of English spelling and instruction, you can start here. Then, take a look at some of these free resources:
Kelli Sandman-Hurley (dyslexiaspec@gmail.com) is the co-owner of the Dyslexia Training Institute. She received her doctorate in literacy with a specialization in reading and dyslexia from San Diego State University and the University of San Diego. She is a trained special education advocate assisting parents and children through the Individual Education Plan (IEP) and 504 Plan process. Dr. Kelli is an adjunct professor of reading, literacy coordinator and a tutor trainer. Kelli is trained by a fellow of the Orton-Gillingham Academy and in the Lindamood-Bell, RAVE-O and Wilson Reading Programs. Kelli is the Past-President of the San Diego Branch of the International Dyslexia Association, as well as a board member of the Southern California Library Literacy Network (SCLLN). She co-created and produced "Dyslexia for a Day: A Simulation of Dyslexia," is a frequent speaker at conferences, and is currently writing "Dyslexia: Decoding the System."

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Two years ago my life changed with a cocktail napkin at a dyslexia conference in Baltimore. I spent two days listening to Peter Bowers, the founder of The WordWorks Literacy Centre in Ontario, Canada, and Gina Cooke, the author of the blog LEX: Linguist-Educator Exchange, in the booth next to me, talking to dozens of people about something that just sounded like "another program for those with dyslexia."

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Here are some test and tasks which will help you when you suspect that a child might have dyslexia but are not certain.
Keep in mind that these do not provide enough information for a diagnostic assessment and therefore should never be used to draw firm conclusions; only an assessment with a specialist will determine if any child or adult is dyslexic.

Moreover, we strongly advise you not to use these tests before having completed the on-line learning course 'Basics for teachers', in which they are contextualised and explained. It is only by completing the course that you will be able to understand, use and interpret fully and adequately the results of learners in these first level assessments.

Updated September 2016

1. Online Dyslexia Test from ReadingHorizons at home
Many researchers agree that there are three steps that must be followed to for a prognostic evaluation when one suspects that a child may have dyslexia:

Establish a reading program according to age and education. Gather evidence supporting its 'unexpectedness'; high learning capability may be determined solely on the basis of an educational or professional level of attainment.

Demonstrate evidence of an isolated phonologic weakness, with other higher-level language functions relatively unaffected.

2. Digit span - examining auditory short-term memory
Many dyslexic learners show, in addition to their difficulties with the written language, difficulties in other domains, including short term memory.

The digit span test examines short-term auditory memory. The child is presented with sequences of numbers of increasing of numbers of increasing length, that s/he needs to repeat in the order given or in reverse order. The number of digits that the child can repeat corresponds to his/her digit span.

The norms associated with this test allow for the derivation of a standard score (for which the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 10), as well as a percentile equivalent. For example, a percentile of '50' means that 50% of children of the same age perform lower in this test than the participant.

3. Tumner Nonword Decoding Test - examining decoding abilities
The child is presented with a series of nonsense sequences (or pseudo-words). As these sequences have never been heard or read before, the child cannot use phonological or orthographic representations stored in long-term memory to read. She/he is forced to use the phonological decoding system to be able to pronounce the sequences correctly.

The norms associated with this test permit the derivation of simple 'reading age' equivalences. It is for poor readers only.

4. One Minute Reading Test - examining accuracy and speed (fluency) for word reading
The test consists of 158 one-syllable words. the participant is asked to read the words as quickly and accurately as possible and is stopped after one minute.

The norms associated with this test offer 'reading age' equivalents. The test also provides percentile equivalents for adults, derived from University referrals for dyslexia assessment.

There are two sets of norms: one provides the 'reading age' for children, the other provides the percentile equivalents for adults.

5. Sentence completion test - examining comprehension and writing speed using single letters
The sentence comprehension test consists of 40 sentences to be completed.

The norms associated with this test permit rough estimates of the performance of participants aged 9 - 18, as it provides averages for the top 10%, bottom 10% and bottom 2% levels.

The test of writing speed using simple letters consists of asking the participant to write down as many letters as possible as fast as possible for two minutes.

The associated norms provide the same information as those for the sentence comprehension test.

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Here are some test and tasks which will help you when you suspect that a child might have dyslexia but are not certain. Keep in mind that these do not provide enough information for a diagnostic assessment and therefore should never be used to draw firm conclusions; only an assessment with a specialist will determine if any child or adult is dyslexic.

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In truth, Calliope wasn't catching up. As peers began whizzing past her in reading, Taylor became more anxious and worried. Their collective frustration levels - both Calliope's and her parents-soon reached a breaking point, especially after they'd hired a private tutor to help speed up her reading in the fall of second grade.

"She'd have massive tantrums over homework," Taylor said. Calliope would be happy and fine all afternoon, but when it came time to do homework, she would refuse to begin. "She would scream and cry, then I would scream and cry," Taylor said. "I once crumpled up the whole assignment and yelled, 'What are we going to do?' "

Then one night, after four months of intensive (and expensive) tutoring, Taylor's husband, Matthew, was talking to Calliope's tutor on the phone when she mentioned the word "dyslexia." A light went on. Taylor recalled that up to that point, everyone had been very careful not to say the word, but the tutor suggested that it might be time to have Calliope officially evaluated in order to receive more targeted instruction.

An intensive two-day battery of tests provided the data that Taylor, by this time, already knew: Calliope had dyslexia. Although she was very bright and displayed above-average social skills, without intense and specific intervention, she would never "catch up" in reading.

Taylor now knows that an overly emotional response to homework is common in those with dyslexia: Calliope didn't know why she couldn't read either. Now with a diagnosis and intensive intervention, Calliope is entering seventh grade with her peers. She's able to accomplish all the work, although she requires more time. "I always disliked the words 'learning differences,' " Taylor said. "But the more I get to know about this, the more I think it's true."

This kind of anxiety and frustration can be largely avoided, said Wolf, who is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of " Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."She and colleague Martha Denckla designed a simple test to quickly know whether there is a problem in the reading circuit very early on, as early as kindergarten or first grade. Called the RAN/RAS test (Rapid Automatized Naming/Rapid Alternating Stimulus), students are timed on how fast they can name letters, numbers, colors and objects.

RAN/RAS or a comparable evaluation is one of the single best predictors that there's something different in how the brain is putting together letters with their name, which is like a mini-version of the later reading circuit. While RAN/RAS cannot diagnose a reading problem, it does provide educators with a red flag, suggesting that students may need further evaluation.

In "Proust and the Squid," Wolf writes that if she were given five minutes with all teachers and parents everywhere, she'd want them most to know that "learning to read, like Red Sox baseball, is a wonderful thing that can go wrong for any number of reasons." For students accused of being stubborn or not working to their potential, often neither is true: Children with dyslexia need immediate and intensive intervention to connect the pieces of the reading circuit.
The Science of Reading and Dyslexia
The act of reading itself is anything but natural. Human brains weren't designed to read: There is no "reading center" of the brain, and there are no "reading genes." Instead, in order to read, each brain must fashion new circuits between parts originally designed to do other things, like retrieving the names for objects. These new circuits must not only combine many processes from different areas of the brain to form a specialized circuit just for reading -- in order to become a fluent reader, the circuit also needs to run lightning-fast, nearly automatic.

Wolf has spent her career studying how the brain reads and, in some cases, how it doesn't. "Because we have no pre-programmed wiring for reading [in the brain], we have to do something very different," Wolf said. "What the brain does have -- which is fantastic -- is the ability to make new circuits based on new connections among its already-there parts. So, when I said [in the book] we were never born to read, that is the absolute truth. We weren't. Each child has to do it by themselves."

Since each brain must learn to read from scratch, as Wolf put it, "many things can happen along the way." Dyslexia, originally called word-blindness, is a neurobiological condition describing the failure to read words and letters affecting an estimated 10-20 percent of schoolchildren, depending on whom you ask.

While classified as a "learning disability," dyslexia is not a brain disorder or a disease, nor is it flipping letters backward. Often the failure to read is in direct opposition to a brain's cognitive ability, leaving parents and teachers stymied when an otherwise intelligent child can't spell words they've seen a thousand times, or put a sentence together.

Dyslexia, Wolf said, is the result of a brain that's organized in a different way. In many children, this is because the right hemisphere tries to muscle the strengths of the left, specifically at tasks that are the domain of the left, like many language functions. When the reading circuit is being dominated by the right hemisphere, it takes longer for the information that goes to both hemispheres to get together.

In the dyslexic brain, there are several major areas that could develop problematically. (While there is no singular form of dyslexia, there are several profiles that appear most prominently.)

* Phoneme awareness, or knowing the sounds that correspond with letters and words, is the No. 1 deficiency in the dyslexic brain. "Our language is made up of 44 sounds called phonemes," Wolf said. "English is trickier because we have phonemes that can be expressed in different letters, and we have letters that can stand for different phonemes. It's an irregular language, and that adds to the complexity, but the underlying issue for many, but not all, children is problems in the basic representation of those phonemes." Wolf said there are multiple areas of the brain contributing to our ability to represent phonemes, and that many dyslexic children have issues with developing phonemes, as well as knowing which sounds are assigned to which letters.

* Fluency, or getting the reading circuit to work together quickly, is the second-biggest issue. "Children can have perfectly represented phonemes, but can't get the phonemes together with the letters, because there's a speed-of-processing issue," Wolf said. "And part of that may well be because that right hemisphere is taking a longer time and trying to do what the left hemisphere usually does, in getting that circuit to work very fast together. That can mean not just the phonemes aren't represented very well. It might also mean that letters aren't getting represented very well, and that the circuit is not becoming automatic."

* Comprehension is the third but no less crucial issue to reading. "After making letters and sounds work together, and getting the whole circuit to work in time, then words have to be connected to meanings and functions of grammar," Wolf said. "It takes explicit work to get the visual representation, meaning, sound and grammatical function all working together, and that's what dyslexic children must do." Wolf said that often this kind of dyslexia doesn't show itself until the child is older, third grade and up, when a child switches from learning to read to reading to learn.

"Some of our children can read words, but read them laboriously," Wolf said. "And by fourth grade they're a major failure and have never become fluent." Many of these children are bright and have compensated up to this point by memorizing words, but have never learned to read fast enough to comprehend what they're reading.

Understanding that these developments are nothing more than brain differences that can be aided with systematic and explicit instruction, Wolf said, is a large but necessary step for everyone involved: students, parents and teachers. When children find they're unable to read or read with much difficulty, they often believe that it's the result of a bad or broken brain. Some teachers may also unwittingly hold beliefs that reading happens for all children by a kind of osmosis.

Wolf insists that three decades of research has shown that neither are true, but keeping the truth about dyslexia hidden or misunderstood only hurts the students, their parents and the educators trying desperately to help them.

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Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids | KQED

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Reading is a skill humans aren't born with, but schools are designed to reward those whose brains are well-wired to read, which can complicate the learning experience for kids with dyslexia.

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Our podcast about ideas and research in education.

When Liz Hembling's daughter, Mia, was in second grade she could look at a blank map of the United States and tell you exactly where each state belonged, but she could barely read.

"She would read a page and her head would hurt," Liz says. "To get her to read? You might as well pull her hair out. It would have been a better experience."

Mia's teachers insisted everything was fine. But Liz knew something wasn't right. Finally, when Mia was in fourth grade, Liz paid to have her daughter tested and discovered she has dyslexia.

The common perception is that dyslexia is about confusing letters and reading them backward. But neuroscience has shown that's not quite right. All beginning readers tend to mix up letters and read them backward. The problem for dyslexics is they get stuck at that beginning reader stage. Their brain does not easily pick up on the ways that letters and sounds correspond. They need to be explicitly taught the rules of how language works.

Related Episode
There are proven techniques to help children with learning disabilities, but can affected kids get what they need in public schools? Listen.

But kids don't get that kind of reading instruction in most public schools. The focus is more on the meaning of words, not the mechanics of how words are made. There may be some phonics instruction mixed in, but the assumption is that if kids are exposed to lots of text, they will learn to read. That didn't work for Mia, now 14.

"I felt like I was kind of disconnected from the rest of my class because the teachers knew how to teach them but they didn't know how to teach me," she says.

On this episode of the Educate podcast, senior correspondent Emily Hanford brings us a preview of the documentary she's working on about why so many kids with dyslexia are not getting what they need from American public schools, and how fixing things for dyslexics could improve reading instruction for all kids.

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Kids with dyslexia are not getting what they need in American public schools

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Our podcast about ideas and research in education. When Liz Hembling's daughter, Mia, was in second grade she could look at a blank map of the United States and tell you exactly where each state belonged, but she could barely read. "She would read a page and her head would hurt," Liz says.

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This article was provided courtesy of Prof. John Stein and the Dyslexia Research Trust

What are the symptoms of Dyslexia?

1. Difficulty learning to read despite normal intelligence, adequate teaching, and parental support.

2. Family history of similar problems.

3. Commoner in males.

4. Childhood 'milestones'(crawling, walking, speaking, throwing) are often delayed.

5. Slow to learn to speak; poor at rhyming; mispronouncing words, lisps, not noticing small differences between word sounds.

6. Slow at learning letters, letter sounds, alphabet, colours, days of week, months of year, multiplication tables.

7. Poor coordination with unusual clumsiness.

8. Difficulty with distinguishing left from right.

9. Mis-sequencing letters, sounds, numbers, days of the week, months of year.

10. Letter and number reversals.

11. Letters appear to blur and move around and get in the wrong order.

12. Bizarre spelling, same word spelt several different ways on the same page; spelling learnt one day forgotten the next.

13. Difficulty with phonology (the sounds in words) is often claimed to be the most important feature, although these problems are found in any poor reader.

14. Hatred of reading aloud.

15. Difficulty copying from blackboard.

16. Difficulty concentrating.

17. Confusing left and right.

18. Getting directions in the wrong order.

19. Illogical sequencing of ideas.

20. Immunological problems such as asthma, eczema, hay fever, other allergies.

21. Dyslexia overlaps with related neuro-developmental conditions which tend to run in the same families, e.g. Dysphasia (Specific Language Impairment), Dyspraxia (Developmental Coordination Disorder), Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Asperger's & Autism. The overlap with ADHD is around 30-50%, and with dyspraxia is even higher.

22. NB often dyslexics have exceptional talent in other areas: the arts, engineering, business and computing.

Preschool

1. Late in learning to talk, or with speaking clearly.

2. Mispronounces familiar words; persistent "baby talk".

3. Doesn't recognize rhyming patterns like cat, bat, rat.

4. Trouble learning common nursery rhymes, such as "Jack and Jill".

5. Difficulty learning (and remembering) the names of letters in the alphabet.

6. Unable to recognize letters in his/her own name.

7. Family history of reading and/or spelling difficulties.

8. Allergies, asthma, eczema, hay fever.

Childhood

1. Particular difficulty with reading or spelling.

2. Figures or letters, the wrong way round e.g. 15 for 51, 6 for 9, b for d, 'was' for 'saw'.

3. Confuses the order of letters in words.

4. Reads a word then fails to recognise it further down the same page.

5. Spells a word several different ways without recognising the correct version.

6. Poor concentration span for reading and writing.

7. Trouble with sounds in words, poor sense of rhyme.

8. Difficulty pronouncing words, reversing or substituting parts of words.

9. Doesn't hear fine differences in words; e.g., writes "pin" for "pen".

10. Answers questions well orally but has great difficulty writing down the answer.

11. Confuses left and right.

12. Difficulty carrying out a sequence of directions.

13. Difficulty understanding time and tense.

14. Unusually clumsy.

15. Has problems stating thoughts in an organized way.

16. Allergies, asthma, eczema, hay fever.

Adulthood

1. Bright in many ways but has a 'block' on reading and writing.

2. Very slow and inaccurate reading, particularly out loud.

3. Very bad spelling.

4. Difficulty remembering what s/he has just read.

5. Difficulty remembering telephone numbers.

6. Difficulty concentrating when reading or writing.

7. Unable to tell important information from unimportant details.

8. Difficulty taking notes or copying.

9. Difficulty with planning and writing essays, letters or reports.

10. Difficulty carrying out three instructions in sequence.

11. Allergies, asthma, eczema, hay fever.

The Dyslexia Research Trust
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Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics,
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Oxford OX1 3PT

Dyslexia Research Trust Clinics
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Dyslexia Daily BlogDo I Have Dyslexia Or Not - Dyslexia experts have created a list of

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Do I have dyslexia? - The Dyslexia Research Trust has many dyslexia researchers. See their list of dyslexia symptoms for all age groups here...You will soon

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By Rachel Zimmerman, WBUR CommonHealth Blog
Sixth-grader Josh Thibeau has been struggling to read for as long as he can remember. He has yet to complete a single Harry Potter book, his personal goal.

When he was in first grade, Josh's parents enrolled him in a research study at Boston Children's Hospital investigating the genetics of dyslexia. Since then, Josh has completed regular MRI scans of his brain. Initially, it seemed daunting.

"When we first started, I'm like, 'Oh no, you're sending me to like some strange, like, science lab where I'm going to be injected with needles and it's going to hurt,' I'm like, 'I'm never going to see my family again,' " says Josh, who lives in West Newbury, Mass.

Josh and his three biological siblings all have dyslexia to varying degrees. Pretty much every day he confronts the reality that his brain works differently than his peers'. He's even shared scans of his brain with classmates to try to show those differences. Some kids still don't get it.

"There was a student that said, 'Are you stupid?' Because my brain was working in a different way," Josh says. "And I'm just like, 'No, I am not stupid...I'm just dyslexic.' "
THE PRE-READING BRAIN
On average, one or two kids in every U.S. classroom has dyslexia, a brain-based learning disability that often runs in families and makes reading difficult, sometimes painfully so.

Compared to other neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD or autism, research into dyslexia has advanced further, experts say. That's partly because dyslexia presents itself around a specific behavior: reading - which, as they say, is fundamental.

Now, new research shows it's possible to pick up some of the signs of dyslexia in the brain even before kids learn to read. And this earlier identification may start to substantially influence how parents, educators and clinicians tackle the disorder.

"Maybe the most surprising aspect of the research so far is how clear a signal we see in the brains of children who are likely to go on to be poor readers."

Until recently (and sometimes even today) kids who struggled to read were thought to lack motivation or smarts. Now it's clear that's not true: Dyslexia stems from physiological differences in the brain circuitry. Those differences can make it harder, and less efficient, for children to process the tiny components of language, called phonemes.

And it's much more complicated than just flipping your "b's and "d's." To read, children need to learn to map the sounds of spoken language - the "KUH", the "AH", the "TUH" - to their corresponding letters. And then they must grasp how those letter symbols, the "C" "A" and "T", create words with meaning. Kids with dyslexia have far more trouble mastering these steps automatically.

For these children, the path toward reading is often marked by struggle, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. In general, a diagnosis of dyslexia usually means that a child has experienced multiple failures at school.

But collaborations currently underway between neuroscientists at MIT and Children's Hospital may mark a fundamental shift in addressing dyslexia, and might someday eliminate the anguish of repeated failure. In preliminary findings, researchers report that brain measures taken in kindergartners - even before the kids can read - can "significantly" improve predictions of how well, or poorly, the children can master reading later on.
PINPOINTING THE WHITE MATTER CULPRIT
Using cutting-edge MRI technology, the researchers are able to pinpoint a specific neural pathway, a white matter tract in the brain's left hemisphere that appears to be related to dyslexia: It's called the arcuate fasciculus.

"It's an arch-shaped bundle of fibers that connects the frontal language areas of the brain to the areas in the temporal lobe that are important for language," Elizabeth Norton, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute of Brain Research, explains.

In her lab, Norton shows me brain images from the NIH-funded kindergartner study, called READ (for Researching Early Attributes of Dyslexia).

"We see that in children who in kindergarten already have strong pre-reading scores, their arcuate fasciculus is both bigger and more well organized," she says. On the other hand: "A child with a score of zero has a very small and not particularly organized arcuate fasciculus."

She says we're not quite ready to simply take a picture of your child's brain and say "Aha, this kid is going to have dyslexia," but we're getting closer to that point.

Norton's colleague, neuroscientist and assistant professor of pediatrics Nadine Gaab of Children's Hospital, studies the brains of infants as young as 4 months old. She theorizes that even at birth, or shortly after, children's brain structures can show signs of developing the disorder. Her hope is that, ultimately, the current research will trickle down to classrooms and help eliminate what she calls "the dyslexia paradox."

"Several studies have suggested that intervention is most effective in kindergarten or first grade," she says. "However, you have to have several years of reading failure before you can get a diagnosis of dyslexia - end of second grade, beginning of third grade. So we have this paradox."
A YEAR TO LEARN THE WORD 'THE'
Meghan Estrada, of Watertown, Mass., enrolled her son Tomas in the MIT study at age 6, after seeing him struggle with the basics of reading.

"When he was in kindergarten, you know, he was having some serious trouble," she says. "It took him about a year to learn the word 'the.' I could see that he needed more help."

"These children who struggle to read are very aware of where they stand relative to their peers and this is their first major experience in school."

Tomas, now 8, continues to experience difficulty with reading at the end of second grade. He requires more individualized support and intervention both at home and in the classroom. Now he's being evaluated to determine if he does, indeed, have dyslexia.

MIT neuroscientist Professor John Gabrieli is one of the lead investigators of the study Tomas is participating in. "Maybe the most surprising aspect of the research so far is how clear a signal we see in the brains of children who are likely to go on to be poor readers," Gabrieli says.

As part of the READ study, the kids wear colorful electrode caps to measure electrical activity in their brains; they complete a slew of cognitive, behavioral, memory and language tests; and get MRIs to evaluate both the structure and function of their brains. Researchers published findings based on the first 40 kids last summer in the Journal of Neuroscience; the plan is to follow all 186 kids in the study from kindergarten through second grade.

Gabrieli says if these early brain scans and other metrics prove to be predictive, new questions will arise.

"The bigger challenges for us now soon will be...to figure out what kind of interventions can be done in a 4-year-old or a 3-year-old that might put her or him on a different pathway altogether," he says. "You know, can we have a child arrive at school who will be ready to read and not wait for failure at all but have intervened so early that the child never experiences that failure?"

One of the key goals of early identification, Gabrieli says, is to help kids avoid the stigma of dyslexia.

"The social downsides to late identification are quite severe," he says. "These children who struggle to read are very aware of where they stand relative to their peers and this is their first major experience in school."

Kelly Lowery, a Cambridge, Mass., pediatric neuropsychologist, treats kids who have anxiety related to their learning problems, mostly dyslexia. "I have students, you ask them to read and they start to cry - it's a trauma experience," she says.
A TOUGH THING TO HIDE
At the Carroll School in Lincoln, Mass., which specializes in language-based learning disabilities, eighth-graders Katelyn, Lily, Sarah and Aysha (their parents asked that their last names not be used) no longer have to keep their dyslexia a secret. But they recently told me about some of the strategies they used to employ - like pretending they couldn't see words without their glasses, or asking friends to read for them.

Here's what they said:

"Oh, I used to just like mumble over the word or say it really quietly - and pretend like I said it."

"I would be chased down the hallway... it was mostly just one boy, and he'd be yelling at me, chasing me, and the teachers would just watch, and he's like 'You can't read, like you should know how to read by now, you're in seventh grade,' but so, yeah, it was not very fun to go to school."

"I remember that I used to pretend to be sick every day...and it was like most people say, 'Oh, eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, best years of your life.' Not really. Like for some - a lot of dyslexic kids...it was torture."

Dr. Eric Falke, director of cognitive interventions and research at the Carroll School, says children with dyslexia typically find alternate strategies to develop language skills. "Workarounds," he says. "What they do is they use a lot of their intelligence to compensate for little bottlenecks, little quirky things about the way their brain processes information."

But these workarounds aren't always efficient.

"When you talk to an eighth-grader who struggled for nine years in a general educational environment...trying to figure out how to do something that was really difficult for her, [it] isn't actually a good use of her time..." He adds: "If you could intervene earlier...a small intervention earlier on could potentially have a huge impact on a person's life."

So, he says, the Carroll School is ready to act on the new brain science now: "Here's the bottom line: It's like we've wanted to do this for many years, and we are ready to start a kindergarten if there's enough interest from the community."
NOT ALL SCHOOLS ON BOARD
So wouldn't it be great if all kids - not just those lucky enough to attend a special private school - could get a diagnosis, and targeted intervention like one-on-one, daily tutoring and language-based reading support in small classes, much earlier? It seems like a no-brainer.

But Nadine Gaab, the other lead investigator on the kindergartner study, told me she was surprised to discover that not all schools were on board.

"Some of these schools were really open and happy that we want to come and test every incoming kindergartener," Gaab says. "However we also had districts who said, 'I'm sorry, but we don't want you...because if MIT and Harvard diagnoses or identifies children at risk in kindergarten and we don't have the resources to do anything about this, then parents will get really upset with us, and we would feel very guilty as well.' "

When this research becomes more definitive, it remains an open question whether more schools will take advantage of the brain science to test and offer intervention to kids much earlier. The researchers aren't suggesting MRIs for every single kindergartner. But they say someday, if a child has a family history of dyslexia, and is showing early signs of reading trouble, a diagnostic brain scan may prove less costly than playing catch up after years of academic failure.
THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA - UPSIDE DOWN
Researchers already know early intervention can help many kids with dyslexia overcome some of their reading challenges. (Of course there's a huge range of "dyslexia" and severity varies widely.)

One effective approach, called RAVE-O, was developed by Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. In her office, Wolf picks up a plastic model of a brain and explains that many children with dyslexia appear to be processing reading information in the right hemisphere, which may be less effective for language tasks, whereas typical readers rely on brain circuitry in the left hemisphere for these functions.

RAVE-O seeks to work around this, and help kids gain "automaticity" in all aspects of language. It's a toolkit of strategies to make explicit the critical connections between sounds, symbols, syntax and meaning while also infusing some levity in the process. Kids learn about the "am" family, for instance, with pictures of jelly "jam," a guitarist "jamming" and a traffic "jam."

But for Wolf, this topic isn't just academic, it's personal: Her first son has dyslexia. She recalls a moment, when, as a junior high-schooler, he returned from a trip to Italy. "[A]nd he said, 'Mom, I just want you to see what I just drew from memory.' I looked. It was a perfect picture of the leaning tower of Pisa - upside down. And I said, 'Why did you do that?' And he said, 'It's just easier for me to draw that way.' "

Wolf's son is now a successful artist and sometimes she wonders whether that's despite his dyslexia - or because of it. Indeed, a national movement has emerged to spotlight the unique attributes of the dyslexic brain. Writers like Malcolm Gladwell and others have explored the "upside of dyslexia", which can be marked by unusual problem-solving skills and outside-the-box thinking.

A few years back, for example, a widely reported study found that 35 percent of U.S. entrepreneurs identified themselves as dyslexic. Lists of celebrities with dyslexia, like Whoopi Goldberg and Henry Winkler, are becoming ubiquitous. And researchers, notably Sally and Bennett Shaywitz at the Yale Center For Dyslexia and Creativity, seek to emphasize the "sea of strengths" around dyslexia. (But even they write about the importance of accurate, precise diagnosis and early, evidence-based intervention.)
A MOTHER'S VIEW
Indeed, as a research subject - and a kid who's changed schools many times to find teachers who "get" how he learns - Josh Thibeau, now at the Landmark School in Pride's Crossing, Mass., has a unique appreciation of his own brain.

"It's been described to me as a library, and now I think of it as a maze that's like constantly changing," he says, "and hopefully, it'll be just one straight line, that's where I need to go, that's the place I need, that's the information that I need to extract."

Still, for Josh's mother, Janet Thibeau, there remains a sadness knowing her kids will never share her love of reading, and there's no getting around the severe challenges that come with a learning disability.

"You see kids struggle and not get their needs met and you see them turning into teenagers who make bad or unsafe choices," she says.

Thibeau says she certainly appreciates the resilience that can come from overcoming adversity. But, she says, the prospect of earlier intervention for far more children with dyslexia is also encouraging.

"It gives the entire community... parents, schools, an opportunity to just keep kids away from seeing themselves as not smart or worthless, and seeing them really reaching amazing potential," she says. "These are really bright kids who are capable of a lot once those underlying weaknesses are met."
A note on terminology: One problem that arises in talking about dyslexia is that not everyone uses the term "dyslexia," and there is no one, standard definition. For instance, Elizabeth Norton of MIT explains: "The terms used to define reading difficulties are inconsistent. The state of Massachusetts and even federal education laws don't use the term 'dyslexia;' instead, they use terms such as 'specific learning disability in reading' or 'specific learning impairment.' Some students may receive a more specific diagnosis of 'dyslexia' or "language-based learning disability" from an independent clinician. Further, the DSM 5 doesn't include a definition of "dyslexia."
The Carroll School uses "language-based reading disability" and also dyslexia. The NIH refers to "developmental reading disorder" and "dyslexia" interchangeably.
This post originally appeared on WBUR's CommonHealth blog.
Predicting Dyslexia - Even Before Children Learn to Read

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Predicting Dyslexia - Even Before Children Learn to Read

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New research shows it's possible to pick up some of the signs of dyslexia in the brain even before kids learn to read. And this earlier identification may start to substantially influence how parents, educators and clinicians tackle the disorder.