More than 30 states have implemented early literacy screenings to test for challenges like dyslexia, according to WestEd.
When California became one of the more recent states to mandate this, passing a law in 2023 that took effect this school year, the state ensured inclusiveness for English language learners, said Robin Irey, education research specialist at the University of California-San Francisco Dyslexia Center. The center developed one of the state’s four recommended screening tools, called Multitudes.
After five years of developing the tool and testing it with more than 15,000 California children, the UCSF Dyslexia Center felt confident that Multitudes (along with the other screeners) accounted for English learners, Irey said.
“Slow but steady wins the race,” she said. “It’s a product of the fact that we have some really strong advocacy groups who wanted to make sure we had a culturally responsive design. Particularly in California’s context, there are a lot of EL learners, and we want to acknowledge that and not over-identify those students by just giving an assessment in English.”
The screener also doesn’t start in English and then switch to Spanish midway if it’s not going well for a particular pupil, Irey said.
“We built in ways for the system to direct you to give Spanish and English in different measures after you get a sense of a child’s ability in both languages. That’s the benefit of a more thoughtful process,” she said, adding that specialists in African American English also were consulted to ensure that dialectical differences weren’t coded as errors.
Early literacy screenings are critical to catching struggling readers at younger ages, whether they have dyslexia or face other challenges, so schools can provide intensive interventions when they are still young and building their language-related neuropathways, Irey said.
Multitudes provides a 10- to 15-minute screening that indicates a student needs more assessment along with more in-depth testing that provides “a fuller ability to get a picture of the student, to see where their strengths may lie, and what they could benefit from,” Irey said.
Another key aspect of Multitudes is that it’s free, which Irey says may be unique. While universities in other states have developed tools, most are being offered by for-profit companies, she added.
California’s multifaceted model includes additional funding for reading specialists, so the state is “getting folks in schools to provide more support as schools are getting the screening results and figuring out what to do with them,” Irey said. “We’re hoping that the funding will move the instructional needle, because that’s the point of all of it.”
While the screeners are the first step to find the students who need interventions, they need to then be matched with those supports, Irey said.
“The states seeing big differences are the ones that rolled out a mandate matched with professional development and instructional resources,” she said, citing Virginia, Ohio and Mississippi for showing signs of success. “I wouldn’t say that just doing screening will solve the problems. You have to make sure it's a multi-pronged approach.”
And those interventions need to cover all domains, ranging from phonological awareness to decoding, Irey said.
“You don’t want a kid to come up as needing support, but you don’t know specifically why,” she said. A school might start a comprehensive intervention in that case when the student needs a more targeted approach, making inefficient use of everyone’s time and not giving the student enough time on the intervention they really need, she added.
Then, educators need to have a system in place to move the student through different tiers of interventions, as well as continuously monitoring to understand if they have responded as hoped, Irey said.
And if the vast majority of students need help in a particular area, she said, “We are hoping that might trigger a response in a teacher or a support person [to ask], ‘Is there some way we might provide support to the full class?’”
