When do assessments begin in K?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Contact the school now.

Also get on a private screening waiting list. The school will hold a meeting within the time frame necessary and then tell you that they need to see how your child does since they have never been in a formal school setting. If you keep pushing for testing, you may get it, but they don’t have good tests for learning disabilities for the younger kids.

“The challenge with early screeners or assessments for dyslexia is that in order to detect the subtle early signs of dyslexia, they tend to over identify children as at risk (i.e., false positives). False positives occur when children score poorly on a dyslexia screener but still develop typical reading and spelling skills. This is because measures of phonological processing and early print awareness, often used to identify children with dyslexia prior to reading instruction, are confounded by a child’s linguistic and cognitive development as well as opportunities and experiences to learn. While cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists continue to identify important behavioral and neuro markers associated with dyslexia to reduce the number of false positives when screening children under 6 years of age, current false positive rates are unacceptably high. To decrease false positives associated with early screening for dyslexia, it is often recommended that diagnosis for dyslexia take place after children have had some experience with learning to read. However, this practice again tends to delay the opportunity for early intervention before children begin to fail.”

https://improvingliteracy.org/ask-an-expert/can-young-child-under-age-6-be-diagnosed-dyslexia-or-age-focus-recognizing-warning

I am just putting this in because this is why many kids don’t receive diagnosis of specific learning disabilities until later 2-3 grade. If your kid needs speech, that will be looked at early, but reading issues tend to not get addressed until later.