Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

“The actual reading impairment a child shows at any point is always the result of an
interaction between the child’s degree of disability and the strength of instruction that
has already been provided. Children with a mild reading disability who are provided only
weak instruction (in the regular classroom or in a special education setting) will show
larger reading impairments when tested than will children with the same degree of
reading disability who have had stronger instruction… By the same token, children who
remain severely reading impaired within a strong instructional environment are likely to
have a more serious reading disability than those who have remained impaired after
receiving only weak instruction. Thus, if researchers select their intervention samples
from among children who have already received a good dose of appropriate and
reasonably intensive instruction, the children in those samples will be more difficult to
teach than children who are selected by the same reading criteria from a weaker
instructional environment.” (Torgesen, 2005a, p.113)
2.9.2 Degree of impairment
Some of the lowest gains in the studies summarized in Table 4 are seen in the research
by Lovett et al. (1994) and Lovett et al. (2000), but it should be noted that the
participants in these studies were exceptionally disabled in reading, with average word
identification scores of only 56–64 (