Dyslexia testing results: What they mean for instruction and supports

Interpreting dyslexia testing results can be tricky. Ask the evaluation team to clarify or explain things you don’t understand in your child’s evaluation report.

Making sense of dyslexia testing results can be tough. If your child has trouble with reading and has had a full evaluation, you may wonder how to interpret the scores on tests that look at key reading skills.

The evaluation report will show an overall score for reading. That score doesn’t show the complete picture, however, because it’s based on a group of subtests that look at different skills involved in reading.

Your child might have an overall score that’s in the average range for that age group, for instance. But one or two of the subtest scores might be low-average.

When the overall score is in the average range, but one subtest score is much below the others, that’s sometimes referred to as a “relative weakness.” Seeing those subtest scores can be helpful in knowing where your child needs some help.

This chart shows what each reading skill entails, and how the school may be able to support your child.

Reading skill tested

Instructional strategies

Accommodations and tools

Phonological awareness: The ability to recognize and work with sounds. This involves:

Understanding rhyming and being able to rhyme

Changing sounds in words to make new words (like from cat to bat)

Blending and splitting syllables

Breaking a word into a series of sounds

Blending sounds into words

Identifying the first, middle or ending sounds of words

How teachers can help

Using explicit, evidence-based, step-by-step phonics instruction. This type of instruction typically uses a multisensory approach.

The classroom teacher may use this approach. But students often get this instruction from a reading specialist (typically before being identified with a learning disability) or from a special education teacher.

That can happen as part of an intervention or as part of special education.

Accommodations

Having text read aloud

Listening to recorded versions of text

Assistive technology

Reduced length and complexity of texts

Extra time on tests and assignments

Related services

Speech-language therapy

Support from a reading specialist or an instructional assistant

Decoding: The ability to sound out unfamiliar words using the rules of phonics. This involves:

Sounding out letters and clusters of letters

Recognizing word families (e.g., mat, fat, bat)

Knowing how to predict unfamiliar words

How teachers can help

Using evidence-based instruction and interventions focused on blending letter sounds to make words. This type of instruction typically uses multisensory techniques.

The classroom teacher may use this approach. But students often get this instruction from a reading specialist (typically before being identified with a learning disability) or from a special education teacher.

That can happen as part of an intervention or as part of special education.

Accommodations

Using “cheat sheets” for the spelling of prefixes, suffixes, and vowels in difficult words

Using “cheat sheets” for word families — groups of words with common patterns, sounds or combinations of letters (cat, hat, and pat are all members of the -at family)

Having text read aloud

Opportunities for repeated readings

Assistive technology

Related services

Speech-language therapy

Support from a reading specialist or an instructional assistant

Reading fluency: Reading without many errors, at a reasonable speed, and with proper expression (when reading aloud). This involves:

Reading words accurately

Recognizing words without having to sound them out

Using appropriate tone, expression, phrasing and volume

Reading at a conversation pace and smoothly

How teachers can help

Using evidence-based interventions and instruction to improve decoding skills that are needed to read fluently

Focusing on improving letter and sound recognition (phonological awareness)

The classroom teacher may use this approach. But students often get this instruction from a reading specialist (typically before being identified) or from a special education teacher.

That can happen as part of an intervention or as part of special education.

Accommodations

Having text read aloud

Opportunities for repeated readings

Assistive technology like text-to-speech

Having key vocabulary words in an assigned book or text provided and reviewed

Extended time for assignments and tests

Related services

Support from a reading specialist or an instructional assistant

Reading comprehension: Understanding and gaining meaning from text while reading. This involves:

Understanding individual words and sentences

Having a strong enough vocabulary

Recalling what was read

How teachers can help

Using structured, connected and scaffolded instruction

Organizing knowledge and skills into “chunks” to present in a logical way

Showing connections between the new “chunks” and what kids already know

Teaching the features of different genres of text (fiction, nonfiction, persuasive writing, etc.)

Teaching skills needed to contrast, compare, infer and talk about what was read

Doing read-alouds and think-alouds

Accommodations

Having a review of key vocabulary terms in a text

Having a summary of the text before reading

Using a study guide

Using sticky notes or highlighters to mark important information

Having help with explaining the text in their own words

Having an adult read aloud text in content area subjects

Opportunities for repeated readings

Extra time on assignments and tests

Having an extra set of textbooks to use at home

Assistive technology

Text-to-speech or optical character recognition (OCR)

Audiobooks and digital text-to-speech books

Highlighting and annotation tools

Digital graphic organizers

Reading templates

Evaluation reports can be dense and full of terms you may not know. Be sure to ask the evaluation team to clarify or explain things in the report. And keep asking until you fully understand each part of the test setup and results.

What’s next

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