Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p5303"

Purpose. Around 3-15% of all pupils have dyslexia. According to the core curriculum, student assessment should be conducted in a comprehensive way, considering students’ individual difficulties. However, assessment instructions might be considered vague. Earlier studies have also shown that teachers may perceive assessment as complicated, particularly when it comes to students with special needs. The purpose of the study is to describe, analyze and interpret how secondary school teachers experience assessment and grading of pupils with dyslexia. The purpose is also to explore how pupils are enabled to show their knowledge in an adequate way. Furthermore, teachers’ perceptions of assessment fairness with regard to pupils with dyslexia are discussed. Methods. The research was conducted as a qualitative study with a phenomenographic research approach. The material consists of eight semi-structured, individual interviews with teachers working in two Swedish-speaking secondary schools i Finland. The collected material was analyzed using thematic analysis. Results and conclusions. Teachers expressed a genuine will to support pupils with dyslexia and they stated that they could assess pupils in a flexible way. Cooperation with special education teachers was perceived as important. The versatility of the core curriculum was regarded as an advantage for students with dyslexia. The most used accommodations were oral responses, extended time and test writing in a small group. Double assessment, prioritized content and adapted tests were also used, but teachers had different approaches. A student’s positive lesson activity could lead to a better grade. Language teachers struggled with the assessment of misspelled words. IT software was not widely used. The teachers stated that they did their best to take students’ difficulties into consideration when giving them grades, and they normally also thought their assessment was fair. The study shows that teachers do their very best to assess students with dyslexia, but there are differences in procedures between teachers, which might lead to unequal assessment.

Successful vocabulary acquisition requires encoding of newly learned spoken words into a long-term storage. At the neural level, this means optimal establishment of novel neural connections and rapid formation of memory traces for words. In adults the rapid formation of memory traces is seen as an enhanced neural response at 50 ms after word recognition point to novel words after short exposure. To explore the rapid word memory trace formation in children with dyslexia, we recorded online neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) during a short (~35mins) session of passive exposure to a novel pseudo-word in school-aged dyslexic children and matched fluently reading controls. The memory trace formation for the novel word was investigated by comparing the average ERPs of trials in the early and late part of the exposure. In fluently reading children, the neural response to the unfamiliar pseudo-word at early latencies after word disambiguation point increased significantly by the end of the session, putatively indicating memory trace formation for the novel word. In contrast, the neural response at the early latencies did not show any change in the group with dyslexia between the early and late stages of the exposure, indicating impaired rapid formation of memory traces for novel words. We propose that rapid neural learning of new spoken words is impaired in dyslexic children, possibly due to deficient phonological processing, development of phonological representations and phonological short-term memory, and hinders efficient vocabulary growth.

Objective. The previous studies have focused mainly on deviant linguistic processing regarding dyslexia, while people's experiences and contextual factors have received less attention. This study gives voice to the dyslexic students who can tell about their own experiences about dyslexia. Additionally, the objective of this study is to examine what kind of difficulties the students face while studying and which strengths they have. This study can bring a new perspective and decrease prejudices towards dyslexia. Method. Focused interview was used as a method of this study. The interviews consisted of questions inspired by the previous literature. Eight students were interviewed, six of them were studying at the university and two of them were studying at the university of applied sciences. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were analysed with qualitative content analysis. Results and conclusion. On the basis of the analysis the interviews included several positive aspects. Many of the participants told they were quite open about their own dyslexia. They were also used to observe their learning and they had found several useful ways to learn. Many of them used deep learning as their learning method. They had also coped several difficulties and they believed in themselves. Especially organizing big amount of information, learning foreign languages and organizing different studying was challenging for them. Several participants reported that their learning was quite slow. In this study dyslexia was a phenomenon, not only a limitation. All the students have their strengths and limitations, regardless if they have a dyslexia or not.

Dyslexia affects reading speed and accuracy. Developmental dyslexia is a heritable learning disability related to structural changes in the brain and deficits in sound discrimination. Dyslexia and its’ genetic risk have been studied with auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) from babies to adults. Dyslexia has been associated with changes in the cortical change detection response called the mismatch negativity (MMN). Dyslexic adults and children elicit attenuated MMN responses compared to the control group. The controls’ MMN responses to speech sounds are more pronounced on the left hemisphere than the at-risk group’s responses. Interventions targeting the sound discrimination and phonological awareness have resulted in better reading and writing skills. Rehabilitation is most efficient already before school-age but research on early markers of dyslexia is still insufficient. We studied the relation between inherited dyslexia risk and newborn brain responses by recording ERPs from 38 babies. Half of them were controls. Newborns in the at-risk group had one parent with diagnosed dyslexia. During the ERP recordings we used a speech sound stream consisting of the repetitive pseudoword /ta-ta/. The latter syllable contained infrequent duration, frequency and vowel changes. The sound stream also contained distinct and surprising sounds. We also included a control paradigm to investigate how acoustic variance in the speech sounds affects the brain responses. The speech sound ERPs were small in amplitude. Duration and frequency changes elicited significant MMN responses in both the at-risk and control groups. The strongest MMN response in both groups was due to duration change. The onset of this MMN response seemed to be delayed in the at-risk group. The profiles for standard responses and frequency-MMN responses differed between the groups but these differences didn’t reach statistical significance. Acoustic variance had no effect on the MMN amplitude. Background factors including sex, duration of the pregnancy and birth weight correlated with the response amplitudes. Overall these results show that inherited dyslexia risk contributes to sound discrimination skills soon after birth. Hence studying auditory discrimination interventions at an early age is well-grounded.