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Identifying students with dyslexia in higher education

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Abstract

An increasing number of students with dyslexia enter higher education. As a result, there is a growing need for standardized diagnosis. Previous research has suggested that a small number of tests may suffice to reliably assess students with dyslexia, but these studies were based on post hoc discriminant analysis, which tends to overestimate the percentage of systematic variance, and were limited to the English language (and the Anglo-Saxon education system). Therefore, we repeated the research in a non-English language (Dutch) and we selected variables on the basis of a prediction analysis. The results of our study confirm that it is not necessary to administer a wide range of tests to diagnose dyslexia in (young) adults. Three tests sufficed: word reading, word spelling and phonological awareness, in line with the proposal that higher education students with dyslexia continue to have specific problems with reading and writing. We also show that a traditional postdiction analysis selects more variables of importance than the prediction analysis. However, these extra variables explain study-specific variance and do not result in more predictive power of the model.

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, this excluded the Dyslexia Adult Screening Test (DAST), developed in the UK for our target population (Nicolson & Fawcett, 1997), because this test is not available in Dutch. The DAST includes 11 subtests, such as literacy measures, phonological processing, rapid naming, working memory, non-verbal reasoning, verbal fluency, and postural balance.

  2. The test administrators were the two first authors and a test psychologist. To standardize the administration each administrator read the manuals of tests, had a practice session, and was observed by the others during the first ten sessions.

  3. The remediation service in Ghent is already using the outcome of our study (Table 6) for the initial assessment of new students with a suspicion of dyslexia.

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Acknowledgements

This study was made possible by an Odysseus Grant awarded by the Government of Flanders to MB. The authors thank Valérie Van Hees and Charlotte De Lange from Cursief for their help in the study and the recruitment of participants. They also thank Joke Lauwers for her assistance in testing the participants and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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Correspondence to Wim Tops.

Appendix A: Correlation matrix of the ten variables with the largest effect size

Appendix A: Correlation matrix of the ten variables with the largest effect size

Table 7 Correlation matrix of the ten variables with the largest effect size

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Tops, W., Callens, M., Lammertyn, J. et al. Identifying students with dyslexia in higher education. Ann. of Dyslexia 62, 186–203 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-012-0072-6

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