Health

Early Detection Critical in Children with Dyslexia

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 31, 2002 / 8:41 AM EST / CBS

Most people don't earn $87,000 dollars in 1 year. But one teenager received that much for just doing his homework. Matt Miller's brother Andrew was diagnosed with dyslexia after many years of struggling to read. Matt designed a mock grant program only to find that his fictional project could be applied to real kids in real schools.

As an eighth grader, 15-year-old Matt Miller received a grant of $87,300 to investigate how early detection can help children who suffer from dyslexia. He applied for and received the grant because his little brother suffers from the reading disorder, which affects about 15% of the population.

Experts estimate that between 5 and 15% of Americans have some degree of dyslexia, which involves a brain structure that makes it difficult for a learning reader to connect verbal sounds with the letters or symbols that ''spell'' that sound. Such connections are essential to learn to read.

Matt Miller's brother, Andrew, now 13, had long struggled in school. His parents were aware that something was wrong, but as is often the case, the symptoms went undiagnosed for years. It wasn't until 1998 when Andrew was in fourth grade that he was finally told he was dyslexic. Realizing Andrew needed special attention, the family moved to Monterey, California, to enroll Andrew in the Chartwell School--a school for children with dyslexia.

Matt learned that the time period between kindergarten and the third grade is the most critical for learning to read. Early detection could have saved his brother a lot of pain and frustration. So, in the fall of 1999, when Matt was asked to produce a grant proposal during a yearlong project for his English class, he chose the subject of dyslexia. Using the Internet and resident specialists like Chartwell's executive director, John Alexander, Matt completed his project, which is called Dyslexia: Early Identification & Intervention Plan.

Matt knew it would be viable in the real world and presented the plan to Jack Marchi, the superintendent of his school district. Marchi saw its value but lacked the funds to proceed with it, but he promised Matt that if he could raise the money, he would administer the program in Pacific Grove, California. That was last fall. By January, Matt had received a grant of $87,300 from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (of Hewlett-Packard).

The grant will allow the program to be administered to the 180 kindergarten students of both Pacific Grove elementary schools. This is the test class. For 3 years, three times a year, the class entering kindergarten in August will be tested on their phonological awareness. Phonological awareness, considered a strong predictor of reading ability, is the ability to sequence segments of words and manipulate sounds within a word. For example, if the sound "da" was removed from the word "powder," the dyslexic would have trouble realizing the new word is "power." If asked to take off the "boy" in "cowboy," th young dyslexic would be slow to answer "cow."

If a student were having problems, he or she would enter an intervention program 4 days a week for 20 minutes each day. By the next assessment, if the child showed improvement, he or she would be removed from the program.

There will be two periods when the program, as a whole, will be assessed for its success or failure. In first grade, the school makes decisions on whether to place some children in Chapter One, a remedial reading class, or a special education program. The administrators will then compare the referrals of the test class to the previous class. In second grade, Californians take their first standardized test, called STAR. The administrators will again compare the reading results from the STAR test to the results of the previous years. They expect to find a statistically significant improvement in the "test" class compared to the class of the previous years.

Kindergarten through third grade education is criticl in learning to read. According to Alexander of Chartwell, if a child has a reading problem but is not identified and given intervention, he or she has a only a 26% chance of reading at their grade level.

Alexander says that this study is important because there is currently little dyslexic screening during that critical kindergarten through third grade period when kids are learning to read.

But he points out that the prevalent trend in education is not to label young kids as disabled or impaired in any way because it can be psychologically damaging.