Literacy Symposium Wednesday Keynote - Dyslexia: What We Know From Science

About 40 states have now passed special legislation addressing students with dyslexia. This has prompted a response from the International Literacy Association questioning whether dyslexia is a special form of reading problem and whether there are characteristics and interventions specific for dyslexia. With these public policy issues in the background, this presentation will discuss a scientific view of dyslexia as a well-understood form of learning disability with specific reading, cognitive, neural, and genetic characteristics. Definition, assessment, and comorbidity issues will be addressed, along with the characteristics of effective intervention with dyslexia. The implications of current neuroscience research for intervention will be discussed. Dyslexia is best treated in the context of MTSS frameworks that prevent reading problems through early identification and prevention with explicit, comprehensive and differentiated core general education. For those who do not respond to core instruction, and supplemental instruction and intensive remedial intervention are needed. Like other learning disabilities, dyslexia is real, interferes with adaptation, and has definable neurobiological correlates. But the neural systems are malleable, and many students can overcome dyslexia with early intervention. Intractability to instruction makes dyslexia unexpected, not a cognitive discrepancy.