Visit www.educational-psychologist.co.uk for more educational psychology resources and advice.
Readscreen is free to use for personal, educational and commercial use. It is provided by Wadeson Street Dyslexia Centre, the directors of Educational Psychologist Ltd, and a business angel making a social investment.
Readscreen is intended to allow people to be screened for possible difficulties with reading, to the point where it may interfere with occupational efficiency or academic performance.
The British psychological Society defines Dyslexia as:
Dyslexia is evident when accurate and fluent reading and/or spelling develops very incompletely or with great difficulty. This focuses on literacy learning at the ‘word level’ and implies that the problem is severe and persistent, despite appropriate learning opportunities. It provides the basis for a staged process of assessment through teaching (British Psychological Society, 1999).
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5] (American Psychiatric Association [APA] 2013) is used across the world to provide core standards for diagnosis. Their diagnostic criteria for specific learning disorder: impairment in reading requires the following criteria to be met for a diagnosis to be made. The candidate must have inaccurate or slow and effortful word reading (e.g. reads single words aloud incorrectly or slowly and hesitantly (APA 2013, p. 66).
It seems reasonable to conclude that if a person has difficulties reading accurately, or reads accurately but slowly and laboriously, then further investigation is needed by an educational psychologist because that person may be dyslexic and this may have implications for occupational and academic performance and efficiency.
A number of texts with known reading levels were analysed, words were extracted from those texts that were identified as being linked to the reading level of the text. This gave us a bank of words to use during the trial phase. Volunteers were tested with well-known and statistically reliable tests of single word reading. They were then asked to read the words in the word bank. The results were compared. We were able to set an error rate for two groups; people in professional type employment/students engaged in advanced levels of study, and people in non-professional type employment/students engaged in study at GCSE level or equivalent.
American Psychiatric Association [APA] (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), 5th ed. Arlington: American Psychiatric Association.
British Psychological Society (1999) ‘Dyslexia, Literacy and Psychological Assessment’, Report by a Working Party of the Division of Educational and Child Psychology of the BPS. Leicester: British Psychological Society.