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Identifying dyslexia can be more complicated when other health or developmental conditions are also present. This article may help you map the shared territory, differentiating factors, and key questions to ask as you make your way through a comprehensive dyslexia evaluation.

Around the world, clinicians and educators identify dyslexia using widely varying methods, a recent international comparison shows (Sadusky et al., 2022). That diversity troubles some researchers. Without a consensus on how the condition is identified, are practitioners missing some diagnoses?

Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that causes reading difficulties. Despite that simple definition, this developmental condition is heterogenous: It can look different from person to person. Given dyslexia’s variations, how can you ensure that an assessment will identify the condition in the particular student you’re evaluating? 

Thorough dyslexia evaluations are notoriously complex, largely because so many skills must meld to make a good reader, and because dyslexia can be caused by a variety of developmental differences (Sanfilippo et al., 2020).

Once a screener identifies an at-risk student, the hard work really begins. Here’s what studies show are some of the most common shortfalls educators experience when assessing for dyslexia.

A robust, comprehensive assessment plan can help you ensure that students are developing skills in all five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.