When conducting a psychoeducational assessment, the objective is to understand the difficulties, abilities, and establish a baseline of the student’s functioning and learning.
Why conduct a psychoeducational assessment?
If this assessment is to find out what is happening to our student, “why is their learning not progressing as expected?”. We should analyze which fundamental cognitive aspects in reading acquisition should be considered in that assessment to allow us to issue a diagnosis.
Today, most studies on dyslexia agree that the global (intellectual quotient) and detailed (memory, attention, abstraction, numerical reasoning, verbal, etc.) estimation of intellectual capacity is especially relevant for the diagnosis of DSM-5 learning disorder (DYSLEXIA).
Advantages of applying intelligence tests to potential Dyslexics
The main advantages derived from applying intelligence tests to our students susceptible to being diagnosed with dyslexia are:
- Based on the intellectual quotient, to exclude slow learning or low intelligence as probable causes of academic failure.
- Establish a diagnostic profile based on the intelligence test.
- Identify deficient areas to facilitate the development of specific intervention.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V) provides scores for primary indices, which reflect intellectual functioning in specific cognitive areas (verbal comprehension, visuospatial, fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed), a composite score that represents general intellectual ability (intellectual quotient).
What profile can be associated with a dyslexic diagnosis?
According to WISC-V tests, low scores in the following tests:
- WORKING MEMORY: Measures the student’s ability to register, maintain, and manipulate visual and auditory information.
- PROCESSING SPEED. Measures the speed and accuracy of visual identification, decision-making, and their implementation.
Performance in processing speed is related to visual tracking, visual discrimination, short-term visual memory, and concentration.
These two cognitive aspects of learning in general, and reading in particular, are important for the acquisition and normal development of reading fluency. Therefore, they must be taken into account both for the diagnosis of dyslexia and for a broad and complete intervention, since what is the role of working memory or operative memory in reading acquisition? It is a store where information is not destroyed by the arrival of material from new eye fixations, that is, categorical analyses of the stimulus are performed, and stored as linguistic features. If “b” has been identified as a letter, it means it has been analyzed through the process of letter identification by contrasting it with the letter representations the reader has in their memory.
Learning to read
Learning to read is associated with the development of both linguistic and non-linguistic skills; the relationship of cognitive processes such as working memory and processing speed is evident, but much remains to be studied and researched.
Reading speed correlates especially with attentional skills, while reading comprehension correlates more with verbal memory.
Difficulties in working memory are generally linked to poor or deficient auditory processing; children who cannot follow long instructions usually need to be given instructions step-by-step.
Memorizing letter combinations with sound, i.e., grapheme-phoneme conversion, requires operative memory (working memory) to combine these sounds with their corresponding graphemes for reading acquisition to occur.