You’ve Administered the TOD™. Now What?

The corresponding webinar, Linking  TOD™ Results to Interventions (available on demand), will take

place on February 28, 2024, 11:00 a.m.—12:30 p.m. PT.

The score report for the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD™) is much more than numbers. It also explains and interprets scores, giving you some very important insights into a student’s strengths and needs, as well as the probability of dyslexia. With this plentiful data in hand, you can begin to chart a path forward—recommending strategies for IEPs, 504 plans, individualized instruction, and other supports. But how do you know which specific strategies to employ?

Enter the Dyslexia Interventions and Recommendations: A Companion Guide to the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD). This detailed resource, referred to as the TOD Intervention Guidebook, contains specific teaching and support strategies you can map to directly from TOD scores.

Barbara Wendling, MA, is co-author of the TOD, an experienced diagnostician, and a dyslexia interventions expert. She has co-authored several books in the Essentials of Assessment series, including Essentials of Dyslexia Assessment and Intervention and Essentials of Evidence-Based Academic Interventions. She joins WPS ProLearn® for the webinar Linking TOD™ Results to Interventions.

Here's her guidance for putting the companion guide to good use following a comprehensive dyslexia evaluation. 

You can use the TOD Intervention Guidebook to link a test result to explicit, systematic reading instruction in an identified area of need.  

Test results are important for understanding whether a student qualifies for services; TOD reading, spelling, and linguistic processing composite scores and its Parent/Caregiver and Teacher Rating Scales show you exactly which skills need support. 

“When we were developing the blueprint for the Tests of Dyslexia and looking at all the important linguistic and academic reading-related areas that we wanted it to cover, it was a natural addition to the plan to say, ‘Let's help the teacher side of this equation by connecting the testing results to specific interventions for the areas that the test may have found as weaknesses,’” Wendling explains. “We wanted to something meaningful to come from the testing result.”

This continuum of service is part of what makes the TOD a comprehensive assessment tool. “That’s one thing that’s special about the tests. Whether the issue is in phonemic awareness or in orthographic mapping or something else, you’ll be able to take the information in the Intervention Guidebook and dig right in with an understanding of what you can do immediately for this person.” 

You can use the TOD Intervention Guidebook to plan instruction grounded in the Science of Reading—for all reading levels in your classroom.

“In any classroom, you will have a range of reading abilities present—some students that are well below grade level and some students that are well above grade level. That, in itself, is a quite a challenge for teachers,” Wendling says.  

Because needs vary so widely, the authors compiled evidence-based interventions that researchers have found are most effective across all critical areas of reading. Each intervention is grounded in the Science of Reading.  

Wendling stresses that it’s important to understand what is meant by ‘Science of Reading’. “It is not a program. It is not a step-by-step guide. It’s research that has identified how we learn to read, why we don’t read, and what generally works best in terms of working with these students.”  

In designing both the assessment and the interventions, the co-authors followed decades of research. “I can assure you that these interventions are evidence-based,” she says. 

You can share the reproducible Appendix, “Teaching Students with Dyslexia” to deepen dyslexia knowledge across your whole team.

Wendling points out that not everyone on an evaluation team specializes in reading. For that reason, this companion guide contains a shareable chapter to help general education teachers and other professionals grasp the issues that underlie reading difficulties and how to address them. 

“The Appendix is specifically designed for general education teachers, special education teachers, and other educators,” she notes. “It will help them understand what dyslexia is, it provides an overview of the framework of all the interventions in the guide, and it will help them understand what accommodations might be necessary for a student to succeed. I like to view it as a mini crash course in reading.” 

Key Messages

A dyslexia evaluation involves carefully building a picture of a student’s needs and abilities that’s as complete as possible. You will want to gather data from many sources, including reliable, validated assessments. The TOD yields important information for a student’s holistic reading profile—and in using the TOD Intervention Guidebook, you’ll be able to put that information to use right away. 

“An assessment should be so much more than scores,” Wendling says. “All of us on the author team have had classroom teaching experience and testing experience, so all of us felt that interventions were equally important to developing a comprehensive test…and this guide helps you to implement systematic, explicit instruction across all of the critical areas of reading.” 

For a deeper understanding of how to plan interventions using TOD test results, register for the webinar here.