Formal and Informal Assessment for Dyslexia Flashcards

A CALT wants to assess a bilingual student's phonological awareness in English while accounting for language background. Which consideration is MOST important when selecting and interpreting assessment tools?

Answer: Select measures normed on or validated with bilingual populations and interpret scores with awareness of cross-linguistic transfer

For bilingual students, it is critical to use tools validated with similar populations and to consider how the student's first language may influence phonological processing in English.

What is the PRIMARY distinction between a screener and a comprehensive diagnostic battery in dyslexia assessment?

Answer: Screeners identify students who need further evaluation; comprehensive batteries provide detailed profiles of strengths and weaknesses

A screener efficiently flags at-risk students for follow-up, while a comprehensive diagnostic battery provides the in-depth data needed to characterize a student's specific profile.

A student earns a standard score of 85 on a single measure of phonological awareness but shows multiple other risk indicators for dyslexia. A CALT should:

Answer: Consider the score within the full profile of multiple data sources before drawing conclusions

Assessment requires integrating multiple sources of data; no single score should be used in isolation to confirm or rule out dyslexia.

Which of the following informal assessment approaches provides the MOST direct information about a student's knowledge of syllable types during reading?

Answer: Conducting a structured oral reading analysis using words representing each syllable type

A structured oral reading probe that includes words representing closed, open, VCe, vowel team, R-controlled, and consonant-le syllables directly reveals which syllable types the student has mastered.

A CALT reviews a student's writing sample and notes frequent omission of inflectional endings (e.g., writing 'walk' for 'walked,' 'run' for 'runs'). This pattern is MOST consistent with a deficit in:

Answer: Morphological awareness and orthographic representation of morphemes

Omission of inflectional endings indicates difficulty with morphological awareness—the recognition and application of meaningful word parts such as -ed and -s.

When a CALT compares a student's word identification standard score to the student's word attack standard score, what specific diagnostic information does this comparison provide?

Answer: It shows whether the student's sight-word recognition is stronger or weaker than phonemic decoding of unfamiliar words

Word identification measures sight word recognition while word attack measures phonemic decoding of nonsense words; comparing them reveals relative strengths and weaknesses in these two foundational reading skills.

A CALT notices that a student's reading accuracy is at the 20th percentile but reading rate is at the 5th percentile. The student reads haltingly with long pauses even on familiar words. This profile MOST strongly suggests a problem with:

Answer: Automaticity and fluency rather than accuracy alone

When rate is disproportionately lower than accuracy, the core deficit is in automaticity—the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly—which is a hallmark fluency impairment.