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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Where a child has had a lot of instruction in one subskill, that skill will test well while the actual job stays out of reach. So test the job itself as well as the parts: an unfamiliar word, on paper, with nothing to guess from. Otherwise a strong score on the practised piece closes a file that should have stayed open.
We have knowledge only of what You have taught us (Quran 2:32). A child tends to know precisely what they were taught and no further, which is a fair way to read a very spiky set of scores.
البقرة
قَالُواْ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ لَا عِلۡمَ لَنَآ إِلَّا مَا عَلَّمۡتَنَآۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ ٱلۡحَكِيمُ
They said, ‘May You be glorified! We have knowledge only of what You have taught us. You are the All Knowing and All Wise.’
Qur’an 2:32read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The field defines dyslexia as a difficulty in learning to decode and spell, which means decoding is the thing that has to be measured rather than inferred from its components. This is a conceptual review rather than a study of any test battery. It does make the practical point plainly: a good score on a trained subskill is not evidence that reading is working.
Snowling MJ, Hulme C, Nation K. (2020). Defining and understanding dyslexia: past, present and future.. Oxford review of education doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A trained piece of a skill can score highly while the whole skill it belongs to is still failing.
The word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.
Build numbers and break them up again. Seven is five and two, and also six and one, and a child who can see that has the thing mental arithmetic is made of.
When a child keeps failing at a task, try reducing what it demands of attention and memory before you increase the practice. Shorter steps, one instruction at a time, the working written down where they can see it.