Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may be arriving incomplete. Try saying the same thing more slowly and in shorter pieces, and see whether the answers sharpen up. If they do, that is worth passing on to whoever does the formal assessment.
Qur’an and Sunnah
So that they may understand my words (Quran 20:28) was the reason Moses gave for his request. The measure is whether the other person understood, which is also the thing worth checking when you speak to a child.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Reviews following dyslexia from childhood into adulthood report that it usually comes with executive function difficulties and emotional strain rather than being confined to reading accuracy, so a child's difficulties in the room are unlikely to stay on the page. This is a narrative review, so it maps a pattern rather than validating a screening method. Treat what you notice in conversation as a reason to ask for assessment, never as the assessment.
Farah R, Ionta S, Horowitz-Kraus T. (2021). Neuro-Behavioral Correlates of Executive Dysfunctions in Dyslexia Over Development From Childhood to Adulthood.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If a child does not receive the whole sentence, their answer looks careless when it is really about what reached them.
When not to
Conversational drift can also come from hearing loss, tiredness or anxiety, so it is a prompt to look further rather than a conclusion.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.
Invent words together. Say a made up word, pull it apart into its sounds, put it back, then take one sound out and hear what is left. The nonsense is the point, because there is nothing for memory to fall back on.