Support Students with Dyslexia with New Tutorials
Support Students with Dyslexia with New Tutorials
Teaching reading skills to students with dyslexia can be challenging, but the National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL) at BU Wheelock aims to help teachers, administrators, and schools meet that challenge with training, tools, and advice to help them identify and teach students with dyslexia and other literacy-related disabilities. NCIL recently released a series of five tutorials, “Supporting Students with Dyslexia,” that use videos, written summaries, and links to outside sources to deepen educators’ understanding of the condition.
When making the tutorials, NCIL wanted to ensure that teachers had information that was easy to understand—and backed by sound research. “The tutorials are intended to be really user-friendly,” says Nancy Nelson, an assistant professor of education and NCIL deputy director. “It’s not just information that we come up with without any reference to research. It’s very intentionally created and collated for practitioners to be able to implement.”
Maintaining the quality of the tutorials was also paramount. “All of the content development and curation goes through multiple phases of quality control on our end,” Nelson says. “So there’s the initial development by the team who’s been vetted by the reviewers who reviewed our proposal in the first place to say, ‘OK, this is a good team with the expertise and the qualifications to engage in this work.’”
Researchers and staff at NCIL teamed up with WETA—the Washington Educational Telecommunications Association—to produce the tutorials. NCIL wrote the content, and WETA worked on storyboards, provided feedback about the accessibility of the content, and brought the tutorials to life. The teams consulted both internal and external reviewers to ensure that the information shared in the tutorials was accurate.
Understanding Dyslexia
The first tutorial, Understanding Dyslexia, presents an overview of dyslexia and explores the neurological basis for dyslexia and its effects on students’ ability to learn how to read. The tutorial also debunks myths about dyslexia, such as the erroneous idea that everyone with dyslexia sees and writes words and letters backward, or that dyslexia is related to intelligence.
Of these myths, Nelson says, “Some of the dyslexia definitions talk about intelligence as being a primary factor for determining dyslexia, and there are others that push back on that.” She goes on to add, “We talk about dyslexia as a word-level reading disability. It has to do with the decoding aspect of reading, and the best practices for identifying dyslexia have to do with assessing reading skill, not assessing intelligence.”
School-Based Screening for Dyslexia Risk
Schools can use universal screening to find students who show risk factors associated with dyslexia. With School-Based Screening for Dyslexia Risk, students take a short test to gauge how well they read—if they struggle, teachers can introduce more focused and intensive instruction before they fail.
Nelson stresses the importance of gradual testing over time, rather than using a single examination to determine whether a student has dyslexia. “Using a single assessment in a high-stakes way is not a defensible approach,” she says. “We talk about screening for dyslexia risk. Best practices involve using multiple assessments over time to make sure that you have a greater degree of confidence that those assessments are really pointing to a skill difficulty or deficit that we can address with instruction.”
She continues, “We know that if we identify those things really early on—not identifying children but identifying the need for support—then we can intervene effectively to make sure all children can read.”
Identifying School-Based Supports for Students With or At Risk for Dyslexia
In the third tutorial, Identifying School-Based Supports for Students with or at Risk for Dyslexia, teachers can identify students with dyslexia using Multi-Tiered Systems of Support in Reading, or MTSS-R, which uses multiple levels of instruction to pinpoint who needs extra support in reading. According to Understood.org, school districts often use three tiers in MTSS-R: whole class, small-group intervention, and intensive individualized support.
For example, students who struggle in whole-class reading may receive additional help in small-group lessons alongside their lessons with the rest of their peers. “We have supplemental tiers of support that students get access to when their screening data suggest that based on this assessment, these students are not on track to meet grade-level objectives at the end of the year,” says Nelson. “We’re providing them with supplemental reading support to make sure that they’re getting a double dose of that foundational reading-skills instruction in smaller groups to improve the odds that they will become proficient readers by the end of the year.”
Students who continue to struggle may be moved to Tier 3, where they work in small groups or receive one-on-one support, possibly in a dedicated resource room. Nelson stresses that Tier 3 should be “reserved for really special cases and not for a ton of students. We need that Tier 1 support for all students and that supplemental support to be really strong. We don’t have the time or resources to do whatever we want, because data shows that’s not likely to work for kids.”
Reading Instruction for Students with Dyslexia
Students with dyslexia typically struggle with phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency, though older children with dyslexia may also experience secondary impacts to vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. The fourth tutorial, Reading Instruction for Students with Dyslexia, outlines research-based methods teachers can use to help students learn how to match letters with sounds, decode text, and understand what they read.
Nelson underscores why teachers need to focus on core reading skills: “If we don’t focus on explicitly teaching students word-level reading skills and foundational reading skills early on—if we don’t focus on helping them become proficient readers by the time they’re in third grade—we are setting them up for failure, and that is not OK.”
Intensifying Instruction for Students with Dyslexia
Even after they’ve received effective reading instruction in class, some students with dyslexia may need more intense support. Intensifying Instruction for Students with Dyslexia, the fifth tutorial, demonstrates strategies that schools can use to help these students. To intensify learning, teachers can give students more time to complete tasks, increase the amount of time dedicated to learning a specific task, or increase the number of chances students have to practice a reading skill.
Disclaimer: The National Center on Improving Literacy is funded through grants from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, in partnership with the Office of Special Education Programs (Award Nos. S283D160003 & H283D210004). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of OESE, OSEP, or the US Department of Education.