Original Post: May 13, 2016
In my last post, I wrote about the dyslexie font. I recently changed some of the reading assessments to the dyslexie font and found it to be helpful for at least one of my students.
In my school, I use the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) for grades 1-3. I am working with a fourth grade boy who comes to me in a small group. Since discovering the dyslexia font, I have been putting the group’s reading material into that font which they seem to like reading. I give them a choice or the normal font or the dyslexie font. I typed a few DRA stories using the dyslexie font. I also copied the pictures from the DRA stories so he would have those to look at.
In March, this boy was decoding at level 24 (equivalent to mid-second grade). His comprehension was level 30 (equivalent to beginning third grade). His comprehension was higher because many of his decoding errors did not really interfere with meaning. For example, he read “ran” as “run,” “his” as “the,” and “took” as “take.”
Reading the DRA in the dyslexie font, he was able to read level 38 (equivalent to the end of third grade) with 96% accuracy. He did not read at grade level fluency, but he had good comprehension of the story. I then tried a fourth grade story from The Basic Reading Inventory which I typed using the dyslexie font. He was able to read this at the instructional stage and he had good comprehension. He was not fluent at this level, of course.
This convinces me further that these children who misread those “known” words are more successful with the dyslexie font.