Most efficient way to diagnose dyslexia

[Anonymous]

We had a full neuropsych eval a year ago that saw no evidence of dyslexia. Just ADHD was diagnosed. I am convinced my child has reading comprehension issues. Is it possible dyslexia just developed during the last school year since the neuro? He’s in second grade. Is there some specific test or certain provider I can go to get him evaluated for just reading learning disability, like dyslexia?
Thank you for any recommendations.

[Anonymous]

What tests did they do? If there’s no evidence on dyslexia on a test of phonological processing then your child has something else going on. C-TOPP is one. There’s another that’s often does as well.

Can they decide but not comprehend? How is their fluency? What about their working memory? It’s possible your kid isn’t visualizing what they read if the issue is just reading comprehension, but deciding, fluency, snd vocabulary are all fine.

[Anonymous]

Can your kid reliably sound out nonsense words?

Does he seem to struggle when reading or is he able to read fluently?

If he reads a long passage out loud, does that improve his comprehension vs reading silently?

If you read a long passage to him, does he comprehend?

Does he seem to have any auditory processing or visual tracking issues?

Might as well add that "dysteachia" is a major problem - education schools are still pushing balanced literacy, and even though the tide has turned as of this year in at least some local districts in the area to phonics, ineffective balanced literacy instructional techniques has put most kids behind where they could be.

[Anonymous]

Did you test at school or privately. School told us no LD.

[Anonymous]

Reading comprehension is different than dyslexia. My kid’s diagnosis is LD in reading comprehension, she does not have dyslexia. However, she was diagnosed via a neuropsych. If yours didn’t flag it as an issue, maybe something else is going on? My DD also has ADHD, and at first we thought that was the reason she was having trouble. But after we medicated for ADHD it was obvious something else was going on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Did you test at school or privately. School told us no LD.

Private neuropsych that cost $5000.
-OP

[Anonymous]

Look at processing speed. Is this low? Also working memory as a pp points out. You can find this data in the WISC tables.

[Anonymous]

OP, look at the other thread - “is this a reading disability” - which extensively discusses how ADHD impacts reading. dyslexia is typically a reading disorder that impacts the ability to perceive and discriminate auditorily the sounds of speech and translate them into symbols (letter combos) (encoding) and to identify symbol combinations and the sounds they produce (decoding). Dyslexics who learn the speech/symbol code often still have difficulty with speed and fluency and since the deciding is laborious this impacts comprehension of reading.

OTOH, many ADHD kids who are also poor readers (about 50%) learned the sound/speech connection without explicit instruction that dyslexics need but they still have difficulty with comprehension due to ADHD impacts like. - slow processing, poor working memory, executive dysfunction, social pragmatic deficits, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had a full neuropsych eval a year ago that saw no evidence of dyslexia. Just ADHD was diagnosed. I am convinced my child has reading comprehension issues. Is it possible dyslexia just developed during the last school year since the neuro? He’s in second grade. Is there some specific test or certain provider I can go to get him evaluated for just reading learning disability, like dyslexia?
Thank you for any recommendations.

Reading comprehension issues are not dyslexia. It is another reading issue. The main things that relate to dyslexia are decoding, phoneme awareness, or RAN issues. Those can lower comprehension but it is more because they are not able to identify the words and not because they don’t understand the words.

Does your child do better with audio books?
What is being done to ameliorate the ADHD?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did you test at school or privately. School told us no LD.

Private neuropsych that cost $5000.
-OP

Take the test results from the report to another neuropsych and have them interpret the results. You shouldn't have retesting, the can probably give you a rough idea of their interpretation in a consult.

[Anonymous]

Read the report carefully yourself and see what it flags.

In our physcho education meeting, the evaluator told us executive functioning and some areas of weakness, but he told us no learning disability. A year later I read the report more carefully and it recommended several accommodations. We were able to get those accommodations. As long as you get the accommodations that you think your child needs, I wouldn't worry what they call it.

[Anonymous]

. If you suspect reading problems, get a tutor. Preferably an elementary school teacher doing tutoring on the side.

[Anonymous]

ADHD and Dyslexia will get you similar accommodations, extra time/teacher notes, working with a specialist, etc. Advocate for what your child needs with your kids teacher and in his IEP meeting.

[Anonymous]

Op, I was in your shoes when my DC was at the beginning of second grade.

In first grade DC was tested by a reputable practice for ADHD and dyslexia. DC definitely had ADHD, but no dyslexia diagnosis because while DCs reading, writing, and spelling were poor the range is so large in first grade (especially at the beginning), DC was normal or low normal in their abilities.

But I had them tested because DC was struggling to learn to read and it just seemed so much *harder* than other academics. But we got DC a tutor who used phonics and DC learned to read by the end of first grade. I thought maybe DC didn’t have dyslexia.

Second grade started and DC was reading fine but was stumped by names and long words. DCs writing and spelling was terrible. I watched Susan Barton’s video on writing samples from kids with dyslexia and recognized my own child’s writing had the same characteristics.

I had to call back the testing place and push them to test again. We had to pay again. We waited until DC turned 8 and there were more tests which could be used to look for dyslexia.

DC did have dyslexia. Very long story short, DC blends sounds very well, but has significant shortcomings in many other skills they tested for. Im glad they did all the subtests - the main tests showed low-normal range, but then some subtests showed single digit percentiles.

I am sometimes grumpy they made us pay again for the second round of testing. I feel like if they had done more subtests the first time they might have caught it. But in the end, the diagnosis meant we did OG tutoring and DC now flourishing in their reading (still slow, but reading above grade level and will read for pleasure). Spelling is good enough for spell-check to help, which is all we wanted.

I wish I had another answer for you, but for us it took paying again for testing, and really pushing them to be thorough.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What tests did they do? If there’s no evidence on dyslexia on a test of phonological processing then your child has something else going on. C-TOPP is one. There’s another that’s often does as well.

Can they decide but not comprehend? How is their fluency? What about their working memory? It’s possible your kid isn’t visualizing what they read if the issue is just reading comprehension, but deciding, fluency, snd vocabulary are all fine.

The tests they did are:
CTOPP-2
TOWRE-2
GORT-5
TWS-5
TOC

-OP