Diagnosing dyslexia is a complicated process requiring a multidisciplinary team to work in an integrative approach rather than a typical multi-disciplinary manner. Public school systems have the staff capacity to make a diagnosis of dyslexia but most often do not understand how to use their information in an integrative fashion to make a quality diagnosis.
Thus, many Individual Education Plan (IEP) teams have an incomplete understanding of what their evaluation data shows, and as a consequence, develop IEPs that do not address the underlying cognitive processing deficits related to the reading delay. The student may receive a label of Leaning Disabilities in the area of language, but unless specific processing deficits are defined, the intervention strategies may be for naught.
The Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns is a screening tool, developed by Elena Boder, MD in 1982, to be used in the diagnosis of a reading disability called dyslexia. The test provides diagnostic practitioners with a mechanism to help define the potential existence of dyslexia and the specific type of dyslexia – dysphonetic or dyseidetic. It is not a diagnostic tool, in and of itself, but it is an excellent tool for IEP teams to use to guide the analysis of pro evaluation data and eventual diagnosing of dyslexia.
The Boder was designed to screen for four subtypes of reading problems including: a non-specific reading disability, dysphonetic dyslexia , dyseidetic dyslexia, and mixed dypsonetic/dyseidetic. It is unique in that it compares a subject’s sight word reading performance with their ability to spell the words from the sight word reading lists. The premise underlying the Boder is that each subtype of dyslexia has a different presentation on the tool and this presentation is reflective of one or more of the dyslexic subtypes.
Further the test helps to establish whether the reading disability is due to auditory (dysphonetic) or visual (dyseidetic) underlying cognitive processing deficits. In the most severe form, a subject can exhibit deficits in both auditory and visual processing which results in a potential diagnosis of the mixed dysphonetic/dyseidetic subtype.
A nonspecific reading subtype performance may indicate that the reading disability is not due to an underlying cognitive processing issue but to potential environmental deprivation or decreased mental capacity.
So the issue becomes – how does an IEP team use the information from the Boder to determine whether an individual has a form of dyslexia that requires specific types of interventions and is the cause of the label of Learning Disability. The next part of this article is going to identify specific tactics an IEP team can apply to be able to corroborate the findings on the Boder.
Education Specialist on the IEP team
- Include the Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns as a part of the educational diagnostic test battery.
- Conduct an analysis of the quality and specific deficits of academic artifacts in the areas of reading, spelling, drawing, handwriting.
- Include a historical review of the student’s progress in reading, spelling, and handwriting as higher functioning students may have learned compensation strategies that mask the underlying cognitive processing deficits which continue to affect their ability to learn and keep up with classmates.
- Compare and contrast the Boder findings with the subtests of the individual academic achievement test(s) used in the battery i.e., Woodcock-Johnson III, Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement, Peabody Individual Achievement Test, Wechsler Individual Achievement Test, etc. More about how to perform this comparison is provided in an article by the same author entitled – Comparing and Contrasting Diagnostic Test Performance with the Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns
Speech and Language Specialist
· Compare and contrast the subtests of their test battery with the Boder performance.
School Psychologist or School Psychometrist
- Compare and contrast the individual subtest performance on the evaluation tools used to assess intellectual capacity or I.Q., such as: the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children IV, the Stanford Binet, and the Kaufman Assessment Battery etc. with the results of the Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns.
Occupational Therapist
- Compare and contrast the individual subtest performance on the evaluation battery such as: School Function Assessment, Developmental Test of Visual Perception, Cognitive Linguistic Test, Berry Test of Visual Motor Integration, etc., with the results of the Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns.
An IEP team needs to work together from a holistic perspective as well as from their individual specialties. A holistic approach helps to see how all evaluation subtest data correlates and corroborates, or not, the existence of dyslexia. There is a process for comparing and contrasting individual subtest information but that is a topic for another article entitled – Comparing and Contrasting Diagnostic Test Performance with the Boder Test of Reading Spelling Patterns.
