Is Dyslexia Genetic...?

Originally published here on March 7, 2008.

Well, is it? That's one of the questions I hope to update my answer on at the Research Reading Symposium (although it doesn't look like there'll be much of a focus on the issue).

The NY Times wrote a piece in 2005 that seemed to imply that a genetic test for dyslexia wasn't far off.

I talked about dyslexia some in a couple of pieces on the pros and cons of Response to Intervention.

Response to Intervention plays a double role in education. On the one hand, it is a strategy for helping perfectly normal kids when they have problems with reading. On the other hand, it is a new model for the process of identifying learning disability.

If there really was a new way to say with some certainty that a child had dyslexia, that might turn the disabilities process upside down again. The problem now is diagnostic: we suspect a child has dyslexia, but knowing for sure is expensive, time consuming, and not that valuable a piece of information within the current framework.

If a medical test for dyslexia emerged, I think we'd have a new new model for identifying learning disabilities before we even got the current new model fully implemented...