Diagnostics in students with dyslexia in late adolescence : Development and standardization of a diagnostic test.

In this presentation we would like to present a research which purpose is to make scientific based diagnostics possible in students with dyslexia in late adolescence. Although the need exists for good and standardised tests for Dutch speaking late adolescents to detect dyslexia, up to now there are no such tests or other similar instruments. With this research, we wish to fill that gap. For this end we have developed a diagnostic instrument which includes different tests for the analysis of the reading and writing processes in adolescents. Apart from the quantitative evaluation of the reading and writing skills, these tests provide also an evaluation of the different hypothetical causes of dyslexia which are recognised or still discussed in the international literature. Since these tests were constructed, 2 groups of people are tested. One group is a representative sample of 17 to 21-year-old students (n=1000), the other group is a group of dyslectic students (n=250) which only differs from the first group at the level of their handicap. The results will be used to standardise the tests and will also be analysed to identify distinctive profiles in a dyslectic population.
Since the audience is multi-lingual, we will focus on these topics who are generable over different languages, like the conceptual framework and the results of the causal-oriented diagnostic tests. Also the advantages for practice of setting up individual profiles will be considered.