The Reading Guru, a leading provider of online Orton-Gillingham reading tutoring, today announced the launch of its free Dyslexia Screening Test, a tool designed to help parents independently check whether their child may be showing signs of dyslexia or other reading difficulties – no matter what their school or state says.

The screening test, available at readingguru.com/dyslexia-test, takes just 5 to 10 minutes to complete and is administered by a parent at home. It combines two research-informed components: a nonsense-word decoding check, which measures a child’s ability to sound out unfamiliar letter combinations using phonics rules, and a real-word reading check based on the San Diego Quick Assessment, a widely used tool for estimating reading level by grade.

The launch comes as a growing body of research raises questions about whether state reading tests are giving parents an accurate picture. A recent analysis by FutureEd, an independent education policy think tank, found that in three-quarters of states, proficiency rates on state reading assessments were inflated by at least 15 percentage points versus the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal benchmark often called “the Nation’s Report Card.”

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Early identification of dyslexia is crucial for mitigating academic challenges and ensuring timely interventions for students at risk. The existing research fails to resolve the psychometric issues for the screening instrument developed. Consequently, this study evaluates the psychometric properties of an early dyslexia screening instrument for secondary school students using the Rasch Measurement Model. 

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Whether and when to use the label “dys­lexia” has been a per­en­nial debate in edu­ca­tion, write Penelope Han­nant and Julila Car­roll from the Uni­versity of Birm­ing­ham.

Some experts and aca­dem­ics argue that there is too much focus on the dia­gnosis of dys­lexia, rather than on provid­ing sup­port for all chil­dren who struggle to learn to read. Oth­ers argue that chil­dren with the most sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­culties have to fight to get the recog­ni­tion they need.

Pub­lic fig­ures, includ­ing celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, have called for all chil­dren to receive early screen­ing for dys­lexia.

We work together as research­ers in psy­cho­logy and edu­ca­tion, with expert­ise in how chil­dren learn to read, dys­lexia, neurodi­versity, and how chil­dren with spe­cial edu­ca­tional needs should be sup­por­ted. While calls for uni­ver­sal dys­lexia screen­ing are well inten­tioned, we believe this approach could lead to more prob­lems than solu­tions.

One con­cern is the lack of accur­acy in many screen­ing tools, which can res­ult in unclear or mis­lead­ing out­comes.

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The chief executive of the British Dyslexia Association argues that early identification of dyslexia must be ‘systematic’, not optional as recent research revealed there is a ‘significant’ gap with how English councils identify and support the learning difficulty in children.

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