Screening For Dyslexia Helps Students Who May Have Difficulty Reading

As part of the state’s Strong Readers Act, Union elementary students in grades kindergarten through third are screened for reading difficulties and for the risk of dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a learning disability, characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. Students with dyslexia may experience difficulty with any or all of the following:

• Learning letter names and sounds
• Phonological processing skills
• Automaticity of reading
• Decoding
• Spelling and writing
• Vocabulary

Elementary school screen students for visual and hearing impairments, which alerts educators to issues students may have with seeing or hearing material that is presented to them. Screening for dyslexia is not as clear cut, however.

Darci Hoff, a language arts specialist at McAuliffe Elementary, said the screening process looks for characteristics associated with dyslexia. Union does not diagnose the learning disability but if issues that characterize dyslexia are presented during the screening process, families are notified, and students are monitored throughout the year.

The initial screening process involves asking a student to quickly identify colors of blocks on an electronic device. Some students may then be asked to sound out short words – which may appear to be nonsense words - to help the screener gauge if a student can identify letters or sound out the “words” shown to them.

The difficulty, Hoff said, can be that some younger students might not have learned their colors yet, or that English might not be their primary language.

The schools will notify families of students, who might present the characteristics of dyslexia, and resources to help them, and a plan called the Individual Literacy Intervention Plan is created for students who demonstrate risk. Furthermore, schools continually monitor students throughout the year with further assessments.