What Are They Looking For In Assessing Your Child For Dyslexia? ft. Linda Silverman, Ph.D

Dyslexia is not a disorder. It is not a disease. It's not even something you necessarily should fix. What you should be doing instead is finding out what your child excels at.

Hey, everyone. We are Sonja and Nick, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we help you support the dyslexic kid in your life. Today, we are excited to welcome Dr. Linda Silverman to our show, and I'll read a quick bio of her. Linda Krieger-Silverman, PhD, is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist. She directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and its subsidiary, the Gifted Development Center, GDC, in Denver, Colorado, which has assessed over 6,500 children in the last 44 years.

This is the largest database on the gifted population. She and her colleagues at GDC have developed 40 instruments. For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education. She developed a course on assessment of the gifted at DU, which was also a short course taught abroad. She has been studying the assessment, psychology, and education of the gifted since 1961, and has written over 300 articles, chapters, and books, including the textbook Counseling the Gifted and Talented, adopted at 50 colleges.

Her latest book, Giftedness 101, Springer 2013, contains a chapter on assessment. It has been translated into Korean and Swedish. Dr. Silverman, welcome to the show. Linda. Thank you. So to start out with, we just wanted to hear a little bit about your background and, you know, particularly what brought you to become interested in learning differences in the first place. Well, I think I've always been interested in learning differences. I believe my husband was dyslexic.

My children both were dyslexic, and I don't believe that I began my journey with them. I think giftedness has always been my lifelong passion. And I, for a while, I got to tutor children who had learning differences, and I was always curious about how I could find better ways to work with them. And then I had the opportunity to get a fellowship at the University of Southern California to work with Dr. Leo Biscaglia, who was known as the love god.

He wrote a whole bunch of books on love. And I was his TA, and I had a marvelous experience with him learning about modalities, learning about all the different ways in which people learn auditorily, visually, sensorially. And I discovered that other psychologists did not have that kind of background or training. So for me to look at how are the eyes working together? How are the ears working together? How is the left side and the right side of the body working together?

That was all part of my very early training at USC. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the Gifted Development Center. How did you come to start it, and what is its mission? I'm so glad you asked that question. I've been, as I said, I've had a lifelong passion for the gifted. And having the opportunity to test gifted children, especially twice exceptional children, was a lifelong dream. So I did not intend to get a doctorate.

I hadn't intended to become a psychologist, but I needed those degrees and those licenses in order to be able to locate children who were both gifted and had learning differences. And that's been the majority of the children that we've worked with over the last 44 years. So right from the beginning, I've been very interested in profoundly gifted children, in twice exceptional children, and in gifted girls.

Yeah. Let's take it to a common scenario here. So I think this is a common experience for a lot of people, is that they themselves start to suspect that their child may have a learning difference, like dyslexia. You know, maybe they first go to the school, and the school says, well, you need a diagnosis, or we don't diagnose it here. Maybe they go to their pediatrician then, and the pediatrician says, that's not my field.

You know, that's not actually what we do here either. So, look, what is kind of their first step? What should they be thinking to do next? I think that to find learning disabilities or learning differences, it's important to get a full, comprehensive evaluation. That's not something the school does. It's not something a pediatrician does. But an astute examiner is going to be able to tell learning differences. But not all examiners have experience with the gifted, and not all examiners have experience with dyslexia.

So there has to be an examiner that they go to who has experience with both. Otherwise, they're going to get misinformation.

Yeah. So who's actually allowed, or who can do, or who can make a diagnosis of dyslexia? Like, what sort of licensing do you need, or what are sort of the rules around that? I'm not exactly sure. I think it's probably different in the public schools. Well, school psychologists, I would imagine, are the certified professionals who have the capacity to see severe dyslexia. But the milder cases of dyslexia that the IDEs call stealth dyslexia, school psychologists are not going to be able to see that.

Because these children won't be significantly below average. They have to be way below grade level before a school psychologist is going to say, oh, yes, this child is dyslexic. So they're much more able to find very severe cases. And they're much more likely to overlook stealth dyslexia. Yeah. If I'm most qualified, I would have to say a psychologist. A psychologist who can give IQ tests. Right. Right. That's an important piece of it.

Which, I guess, let's dig into a little more what that testing looks like. And I know it's a little different because we have to pull out the nuances of, like you were saying, because to be able to look for the twice exceptionality and all that is actually a very different thing. But sort of starting from what they're overall looking for in dyslexia, maybe starting with that first and then maybe into how, you know, looking at the twice exceptionality is different.

I imagine it's the children who are having difficulty mastering reading and mastering spelling and mastering mathematics, often not math itself, but calculation, math facts, the skill level, not the abstract concepts. So the skills, the very early skills in the primary years, children who are having difficulty mastering those skills are probably the ones who are at most risk for dyslexia. So what is the assessment look like if a parent who suspects dyslexia brings their child in to the GDC?

So what, you know, what is the diagnostic criteria? What does it actually look like? We're going to look at a number of different variables, some of them qualitative. We listen to parents. And a lot of psychologists aren't paying as close attention to what the parents are saying. They're just maybe looking at numbers. And if you're looking for significantly below average, and that's your criterion for what dyslexia is, they're going to go fall right through the cracks.

You're going to miss those kids. But one of my favorite examples is, this is a girl who started reading very early. And then she stopped. But at eight years old, she was reading Dante's Inferno. Now, who reads Dante's Inferno at any age, let alone eight? But by the time she was tested, the first tester said she had a 117 IQ and that she did not have any learning difficulties whatsoever. The mother knew that wasn't right.

The second tester, she took her to somebody else. This time she got a 127 IQ. And the tester said, I don't think she fits the qualifications for dyslexia. So finally, on the third try, the mother brought this girl to us. By that time, she was 16 years old. Her mother was reading her textbooks for her. She had no free time to develop friendships or to enjoy all her talents because she was working three or four times as hard as any other student just to get through her schoolwork.

And her mother brought her to us when she was 16. We gave her a waist and she had a 145 IQ. And her rapid naming ability was so low, it was in the bottom five percentile. So we're looking not at total scores, but we're looking at a number of different variables. We're looking at what is this child or this young person's highest score? Not averages. What is their highest score? Their highest score is going to tell us a lot about how intelligent they really are.

Then we're going to look at what is their lowest score? What is the discrepancy there? What is the discrepancy between their intelligence and their reading ability, even if it's in the average range? So symbol search, for example, is one of the subtests on the Wexler Intelligence Scale for children, the WISC. Symbol search correlates with reading. Is symbol search low? Is it three standard deviations lower than their highest score? We would look at that.

I would look at that because I do the interpretations. And I would say, this is suspicious. Then I would look at, does this child read for pleasure? Then I would say, do the parents read for pleasure? And in the initial consult, I would ask the parents if anyone in their family on either side ever struggled to learn to read. So I would look at familial variables. I would look at anecdotes like, was this child reading and then all of a sudden stopped?

That happens when the print gets smaller. There's just a number of different nuances that I'm looking for to put together a full picture. Because how intelligent the child is, is an important variable. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it says that if this child has high intelligence, but is working very, very hard to read, putting extra effort, and needing a great deal of parental support, there's a very good chance that this child is going to get lower and lower grades as the reading demands get more severe.

And they say that there's no specific cutoff point, no specific criterion for determining if a child has dyslexia.

Besides the point there, you could have a child whose lowest score is not even below average for the age level. That's right. But if their sort of IQ is measured by one of their higher scores is 140 or something, then an average score on something else is going to be significantly lower than their sort of their potential. And so that would be a sufficient diagnostic criteria. For me, say for me, because I've had the disappointing experience twice of giving a course called New Ways to Identify Twice Exceptional Children on the WISC.

And I've had learning specialists and psychologists both say to me, but the child is within the norms for average children. Why isn't that enough? Why are you pathologizing the child? Why would that child need any type of accommodations if they're within the norms for their grade level or their age level? The reason that I believe strongly that they need accommodations and interventions and therapy is because their potential is higher than an average child at their age or grade.

And that seems to be all that some school psychologists and some learning specialists are able to wrap their minds around. If the child isn't way below average, why are you pathologizing them? That was a question that I was asked the last time I gave this course. And I'm sure it was by a psychologist who remained anonymous.

Well, and as you pointed out, the work is so much better, too. You know, both the potential, both the aspects of the work is so much better. I tell, I listen to what the parents tell me. If they're reading the child's textbooks to them, then I know this is a child who at least has stealth dyslexia. Yeah, I mean, we've definitely observed that with our daughter. You know, she does need to work, you know, spend more time on schoolwork than other kids.

And with significant accommodations from us, I mean, we read, you know, we read the books to her. We read the textbooks to her, etc. And, you know, with with the accommodations and with our support, she can do quite well in school. But without that, she she would be, you know, lost, but maybe able to compensate enough to be an average student. Right. And compensation is not something you can count on. This was a surprise to me because I got my degree in special education and I really believe that once you taught a child to compensate, they were home free.

But it doesn't work that way. Compensation breaks down under many different circumstances. If your child is tired, she can't compensate. If she's had a fight with her best friend, she can't compensate. If she's dieting too strenuously and she doesn't have the caloric intake to do mental work, she can't compensate. When she goes from elementary school to middle school, she can't compensate. She has to start learning compensations all over again. And so compensation is not something you can count on.

On bad days, it doesn't work at all. On good days, it's great. I think that's such a good point. It's really an important point that I think can easily be missed. You know, we don't realize unless we're experiencing that ourselves. But hopefully we can get the word more out there about that. For parents in Colorado and in the Denver metro area, the Gifted Development Center is a great resource. Do you have any advice for all the other parents out there in the rest of the country and the rest of the world?

I just need to say that the majority of our clients come from other states and other countries. And they do that because they've been to other examiners and they haven't gotten the information that they needed. But there are a couple of things that I would do. I'm a great believer in vision therapy.

And the very first thing that I would do is go to C as in Charles, O, V as in Victor, D.org. C-O-V-D.org. That's the College of Optometrists and Vision Development. That's a listing of all the optometrists all over the world, not just in the United States, that offer vision therapy. And sometimes because if the child is operating in the average range, they may operate in the adequate or average range in their tests.

And the optometrists may not think they need vision therapy. So I have written articles for the Journal of Vision Development on why you should give children vision therapy, even if they're not below your adequate range. And one of the missions of C-O-V-D is enhancement. So there are optometrists, not a lot of them, but there are some who realize that if a child is gifted, average or adequate vision isn't sufficient. But of all of the recommendations that we give, and sometimes it's 25 to 40, parents have come up to me at conferences many years later and said, the best advice you ever gave us was vision therapy.

Now my child is a reader. That is step number one, is check out the visual processing system and see if your child would profit from vision therapy. The next thing I would recommend is that they read this book. Do not pass go. Do not collect $100, $200. This is brand new. I know that most of you are probably familiar with the old one. I like this book a lot. I like this one too.

But this came out in 2023. It's just a couple months old. And it's updated, it's revised, and it's in larger print. It's in dyslexic-friendly print.

What you get out of reading the ID's, the dyslexic advantage, is you understand that dyslexia is not a disorder. It is not a disease. It's not even something you necessarily should fix. What you should be doing instead is finding out what your child excels at. Because it's a brain difference that gives the child or the adult many different advantages. The most of which are visual spatial abilities that are described in Upside Down Brilliance.

But there are other abilities too that are beyond what I talk about in Upside Down Brilliance that the ID's talk about in this book. I just cannot recommend it enough. I'm in the middle of reading it, the revised version. I just adored their first version. Yeah, we do too. We read the first version a while back. And I haven't fully read through the revised version yet, but I've read parts of it.

It's terrific.