It is difficult to describe the agony these young men and women go through in deciding if they are going to apply for accommodations - they do not want to be viewed as different and would prefer to be with everyone else when they take a test. YCDC sees very many bright dyslexic students. Yet still, the shame surrounding my condition prevented me from seeking accommodations later in my schooling.” I had teachers and professors who respected my self-advocacy and didn’t try to deny me access to my education. As Aditi Juneja wrote in Vox, “Through my academic career, I was in the privileged situation of being able to pay for test prep, having time to study for these tests, having access to medical care, being able to afford to take tests multiple times. Indeed, many students do not request accommodations because of the stigma still attached to the issue. In fact, the most significant barrier to fairness is the difficulty students with disabilities have in obtaining the accommodations they are rightfully entitled to by law. Sally Shaywitz has said in Overcoming Dyslexia, “Dyslexia robs a person of time accommodations return it.” And contrary to the popular myth that extra test time would help all students, the evidence clearly indicates that only those with dyslexia benefit significantly from additional time.Īs Dr. The most critical accommodation for a dyslexic reader or test taker is simply allowing extra time. It takes time to access these strengths and so just as a diabetic requires insulin, a dyslexic requires extra time so that the test is a true measure of his or her ability and knowledge rather than a reflection of their disability.Īccommodations are not meant to give dyslexic students a leg up on their classmates, but rather to level the playing field. This is in accordance with our Sea of Strengths model, which recognizes the paradox that is dyslexia - a weakness in decoding words surrounded by strengths in higher level thinking. And while people who are dyslexic have trouble decoding and reading rapidly, they often have an excellent vocabulary and strong comprehension. Having accommodations doesn’t give a test-taker the answer, but it allows his/her brain the time it needs to read the question and access the higher-level thinking and reasoning systems that help the dyslexic use the context to figure out a word. Although often still feeling rushed, the accommodation of extra time allows the dyslexic reader to compensate for having to rely on these slower, non-automatic neural pathways. Of course, dyslexics themselves would strongly prefer not to have to take this route but they have no choice. The fast-paced automatic neural circuit is not available to dyslexics so they must take a secondary, slower pathway that will eventually allow them to decipher the printed word but at a cost of additional time. Here double damage was done–not only violating any sense of honesty but also doing potential great harm to a large group of innocent students - those who have true learning disabilities such as dyslexia and are highly dependent on accommodations to display their knowledge on tests such as the ACT and SAT.ĭyslexia is real - powerful neurobiological evidence indicates that people who are dyslexic, no matter how bright, read by a different pathway, one that takes them more time. The scandal reflected the actions of parents who had their non-learning disabled children claim to have a learning disability so that they could cheat - have someone else fill out the answers to their child’s exam. The recent unsettling scandal around college admissions has cast a shadow on an innocent, hard-working, group of students who had nothing at all to do with the cheating but may suffer repercussions from the slimy behavior of others. Advocacy Back Toolkit for Parents, Educators and Students.Toolkit for Parents, Educators and Students.
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