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Identifying dyslexia can be more complicated when other health or developmental conditions are also present. This article may help you map the shared territory, differentiating factors, and key questions to ask as you make your way through a comprehensive dyslexia evaluation.

Around the world, clinicians and educators identify dyslexia using widely varying methods, a recent international comparison shows (Sadusky et al., 2022). That diversity troubles some researchers. Without a consensus on how the condition is identified, are practitioners missing some diagnoses?

Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that causes reading difficulties. Despite that simple definition, this developmental condition is heterogenous: It can look different from person to person. Given dyslexia’s variations, how can you ensure that an assessment will identify the condition in the particular student you’re evaluating? 

Thorough dyslexia evaluations are notoriously complex, largely because so many skills must meld to make a good reader, and because dyslexia can be caused by a variety of developmental differences (Sanfilippo et al., 2020).

Once a screener identifies an at-risk student, the hard work really begins. Here’s what studies show are some of the most common shortfalls educators experience when assessing for dyslexia.

interoception is the ability to understand the body’s messages. Interoception helps people know when they’re hungry or thirsty, when and where their body hurts, when they need to rest or use the bathroom, and any number of other physiological signals that help people stay healthy.  

Because most ADHD research focuses on children, less is known about how symptom profiles change as people move into adolescence and adulthood. What do practitioners need to know about how ADHD looks and feels at different life stages?

Comprehensive Treatment-Informed Evaluation Frameworks can lead to reliable diagnoses. Perhaps more importantly, they can open a child’s world to you, leading to effective, highly individualized treatment plans.  

A robust, comprehensive assessment plan can help you ensure that students are developing skills in all five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

In August 2022, the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) published a revised position statement updating its recommendations for identifying students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs).

Identifying autism shouldn’t depend on a single assessment, no matter how thorough or precise that assessment is. A clear diagnosis—one your client can trust, and you can feel confident delivering—is the result of a comprehensive evaluation, generally involving a team of health professionals.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends universal anxiety screening for children and teens 8–18 years of age. Learn more about the rising rates of anxiety that prompted the recommendation.

The APA’s newly released guidelines explain how psychologists should choose, use, and interpret assessments for people with disabilities.