Assessing Dyslexia: The Importance of Testing Executive Functioning Skills

Executive function and dyslexia may be as intertwined as Scarborough’s celebrated reading rope. While not every student with dyslexia has executive dysfunction, some studies suggest the two co-occur 40% to 50% of the time. Understanding how executive dysfunction affects students with dyslexia can help you target instruction and interventions where they’ll do the most good.  

How Does Executive Function Enable Reading?  

Executive function is a cluster of cognitive skills that, together, enable people to monitor and control their attention and behavior as they work toward goals. Researchers usually include these skills when they’re discussing executive function: 

• visual and verbal working memory (storing and processing the information you need to complete a task) 
• set shifting (moving flexibly from task to task) 
• response inhibition (starting and stopping activities) 

When young children are learning to read, working memory helps them store, process, and update phonological information. Working memory is active as students map each grapheme to a phoneme. It helps them to hold onto each sound as the next is processed and added. As children become more automatic readers, working memory can be tapped for higher-level reading comprehension tasks (Morris et al., 2022). 

Set shifting plays a role in decoding as students move their attention from one sound unit or word part to the next to make sense of a word. Similarly, set-shifting allows students to move from one word to the next in a sentence—and ultimately from one idea to the next, building meaning. 

Students use response inhibition skills to direct their attention to the visual information that matters, disregarding information that doesn’t. Response inhibition helps them to focus on pairing letters and sounds and to resist the urge to guess when words or letters look alike. Students also need to resist the urge to guess based on context (De Rom et al., 2023). Inhibition skills are, for that reason, involved in reading accurately. 

These executive functions work together. As one study described it, “successful word recognition results from the ability to process, integrate, and inhibit multiple features of words during word reading” (Spencer & Cutting, 2020). 

How Does Executive Dysfunction Affect Reading for Students With Dyslexia?   

Dyslexia can interfere with all of these executive functions. When executive function skills are delayed, it can create difficulties with every aspect of reading, from language processing to decoding to comprehension.  

Here’s a quick look at how executive dysfunction can affect reading in people with dyslexia: 

Word Reading  

Several studies have linked executive dysfunction to word-reading difficulties (Halverson et al., 2021). Working memory deficits can make it harder for struggling readers to remember phonemes in complicated or irregular words. Set-shifting and inhibition deficits can also hinder a reader’s ability to ignore distractions and irrelevant information, whether in their surroundings or in texts. 

Fluency and Automaticity 

In a 2022 study, researchers measured executive function and reading abilities in students with dyslexia, some of whom also had ADHD. On tests that involved timed measures of reading and naming fluency, lower executive function scores were linked to lower scores on reading fluency. Reading accuracy didn’t seem to be affected by executive dysfunction (Al Dahhan et al., 2022). 

Comprehension 

When reading doesn’t become automatic, students may have to focus more of their executive function resources on decoding words. Some researchers think that could leave fewer resources for more demanding processes like comprehension. In other words, students may be so absorbed in reading words that they are less attuned to the meaning of texts. They may also be less focused on strategies to improve comprehension, such as reading titles or summarizing. 

What Could This Mean for Interventions?  

For children with dyslexia, the chief intervention is systematic, explicit reading instruction. Still, there is some evidence that training executive function may have an indirect impact on reading skills.  

Research suggests that it’s more effective to teach reading skills while supporting students’ executive functioning (Cirino et al., 2019). In one study, researchers emphasized the priority of evidence-based reading instruction, saying “children first need to form a solid basis in decoding in order to free up cognitive resources needed for executive functioning” (Nouwens et al., 2021).  

There are many activities that can support executive function: 

• Use reading exercises that involve orthographic neighbors (words that look alike) to encourage students to slow down for more accurate decoding (DeRom et al., 2023). 
• Teach analytical decoding skills to reduce guessing errors (DeRom et al., 2023). 
• Simplify instructions in teaching materials to lower the load on working memory. 
• Break learning goals and projects into smaller steps. 
• Help students predict obstacles that could keep them from completing projects, and plan ways to deal with obstacles (International Dyslexia Association, 2018). 
• Develop personalized checklists to aid self-monitoring during academic tasks (International Dyslexia Association, 2018). 
• Teach specific strategies to strengthen memory and improve comprehension, such as rehearsing information out loud (Peng & Fuchs, 2017). 
• Provide action video games that have been shown to improve attention control and enhance phonological processing speed in students with dyslexia (Bertoni et al., 2021). 

Key Messages  

There’s solid evidence that assessing executive function can help you predict which students are likely to develop reading problems down the road (Halverson et al., 2021). Because executive dysfunction can interfere with word reading, fluency, and comprehension, it may also be helpful to add executive function supports to supplement evidence-based reading instruction for students with dyslexia. 

Learn more: The WPS In-Depth Guide to Dyslexia Assessment 

Helpful Assessments: 

• Tests of Dyslexia (TOD™) 

Further Reading: 

• The WPS In-Depth Guide to Reading Assessments 
• Dyslexia Symptoms to Look for When Testing at Different Stages 
• Strategies to Improve Word Reading Skill in Struggling Readers