He/she is intelligent, has good general knowledge, may be good in art or music, yet faces problems in reading or writing. Spellings are terrible, the ‘b’ becomes ‘d’ or ‘15’ becomes ‘51’ for him/her. There also are incidents of short term memory loss. In that case, he/she is probably suffering from specific learning disability or dyslexia. ‘Dys’ means difficulty and ‘lexia’ means words. It is a common disorder that affects 80 per cent of children identified with learning disabilities.
Pearson Clinical and Talent Assessment recently launched the India edition of their DST-J (Dyslexia Screening Test-Junior), a toolkit for schools to screen their students for dyslexia, at the World Education Summit 2012 at Le Meridien.
Explaining their new effort in the field, Dr. Angela Fawcett, author of one of the tests in the toolkit, said, “A dyslexic has special talents and once recognised he will excel in the field of interest. The child is often reduced to a shambles by the time he reaches adulthood. Limited understanding about the problem among school teachers, administrators, educational policy makers and the parents of the dyslexic child is the reason behind this. The test will prove beneficial for Indian students.”
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Dr. Nitin Anand, Senior Product Development Leader in the company, adds, “The test consists of examiner’s manual, subtest cards, balance tester, blindfold, beads, cord, and 50 score sheets costing Rs. 9700 plus VAT. The sheets can be re-ordered at a nominal rate. To standardise the DST-J for India, a sample of school-going children was taken from the North, South, East, West, North-East and 11 cities of India. The sample is for age groups 6.6-11.5 years. Catching on to Indian culture and the way of teaching, we came up with the India version, though the U.K. version was already available in the country.”
The test includes rapid naming, bead threading, one minute reading, postural stability, phonemic segmentation, two-minute spelling, backwards digit span, nonsense passage reading, one minute writing, verbal fluency, rhyme, and vocabulary exercises. It wraps up in 30 minutes so that the child faces less difficulty and also can be assessed within a short period of time. This helps in getting accurate results as the lesser time the child takes, the better it is.
“My interest in dyslexia was inspired by my son Matthew who was diagnosed as dyslexic 30 years ago, at the unusually early age of five. So, I found out what the underlying causes of dyslexia were. I later found that my husband David was also dyslexic. Living with dyslexia has helped me to understand how difficult it can be,” says Fawcett.
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Identifying disabilities at an early stage is beneficial for the children and it positively alters their learning trajectory. Due to lack of trained professionals who can identify children for dyslexia, mapping of such students becomes pivotal. The DST-J (India) can be administered and interpreted by school teachers, special educators, school counsellors and clinical psychologists say company officials.