Outreach

A teacher holds up a flash card with letters in front of a student.

Dyslexia screening

Dyslexia impacts every aspect of a student’s classroom experience. Still, research shows that early identification at the preschool or early elementary level, along with targeted remediation, can significantly reduce dyslexia’s educational costs.

What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms that result in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading, according to the IDA. Students with dyslexia usually experience difficulties with other language skills such as spelling, writing and pronouncing words. It is estimated that as much as 15-to-20% of the population as a whole experience some of the symptoms of dyslexia, including slow or inaccurate reading, poor spelling, poor writing, or mixing up similar words.

What are the signs of dyslexia?

It is a myth that individuals with dyslexia “read backward,” although spelling can look quite jumbled at times because students have trouble remembering letter symbols for sounds and forming memories for words. Other problems experienced by people with dyslexia include the following:

  • learning to speak
  • learning letters and their sounds
  • organizing written and spoken language
  • memorizing number facts
  • reading quickly enough to comprehend
  • persisting with and comprehending longer reading assignments
  • spelling
  • learning a foreign language
  • correctly doing math operations

Not all students who have difficulties with these skills have dyslexia. Formal testing of reading, language, and writing skills is the only way to confirm a diagnosis of suspected dyslexia.

Free dyslexia screening

One-time non-diagnostic dyslexia screenings are available and open to all. Screenings are conducted by Associate Professor Terri Hessler, PhD, an International Dyslexia Association (IDA) Certified Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist.