Dyslexia Compass Erasmus Project

Project Title

Dyslexia Compass

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Access for disadvantaged; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Disabilities – special needs

Project Summary

The Dyslexia Compass aims to combat the negative implications of undiagnosed dyslexia on children’s and older students’ cognitive development, and consequent unnecessary strains on national education systems. It will do this by creating a pan-European consensus on diagnostic tools and thresholds to measure literacy and phonological fluency across languages and national perspectives of dyslexia, including differentiation for different orthographies (in the case of non-alphabetic languages where migrants and refugees are at risk of being ignored). In doing so, it will equip teachers with diagnostic tools and guidance on operating to measure reading and literacy levels in a unified and aligned way across European countries. In this way, more accurate numbers of dyslexic students will be available, opening more doors to funding, intervention, remediation, and preventive measures. As such, the Dyslexia Compass project will take significant steps towards reducing the impacts of the ‘Matthews Effect’ on development, mental health and inclusion of dyslexic children, especially those from migrant or disadvantaged backgrounds.
With no reliable figures because of the diverse nature of measurement, research into the condition will be problematic. Not only does the diversity of measurements cause uncertainty in terms of what rates of dyslexia may be, they cause uncertainty in what dyslexia itself is. If you know what dyslexia is, you should be able to measure it. Different methods of measurement indicate different views of the nature of dyslexia. If you don’t know what dyslexia is, researching its impact upon social inclusion, health and education becomes problematic at the very least.
Without such a standardised measuring tool, no reliable data about the prevalence, depth, or remedial effectiveness of common dyslexia tools including preventive measures, will be available.
Without transparency, funding for dyslexia – as well as more accuracy for funding and targeted remediation and research – is less achievable, further reducing innovative and integrated approaches to standardized measuring; and so there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for pupils from disadvantaged and migrant / refugee backgrounds with dyslexia to have access to inclusive education practices and opportunities later in life. Social divisions will inevitably widen.
The phenomenon described by Seligman (1967) of learned helplessness creates an environment of educational failure that is both harmful and unnecessary. We also know from the Matthews Effect that an undiagnosed case of dyslexia will produce academic, intellectual, and social inequality, vastly increasing the likelihood of that child not transitioning successfully from primary to secondary education, or further. If pupils aren’t identified and helped early, then their other cognitive faculties will be harmed. This in itself will harm the ability to identify dyslexia because different children from different orthographical systems will have been identified at different ages, meaning measuring reading fluency against other cognitive faculties will become complicated and possibly incommensurable.
Our methodology will be to firstly understand in greater detail exactly what measurements are prevalent current in the EU, taking into account national and regional understandings of what dyslexia is, orthographic depth, national and regional languages, and reading comprehension. This will result in a comprehensive European report describing and classifying current tools used to measure dyslexia.
The report will be used as a departure point for the next stage of the project, which will look to establish clarity on the more effective tools to measure dyslexia. The result of this stage of the project will be a training guide on the various tools, how to properly implement them, and the recommended threshold for proper / improper literacy to establish someone as dyslexic. The final step of this stage of the project is to introduce a translation guide to the manual to facilitate the translation of one measurement from a tool in one European language to another. This final step will mark a significant point in the project’s development and move the European understanding of dyslexia into previously unknown territory.
The last stage of the project will see the consortium embark on the task of analyzing the results of the previous stage, the characteristics of each tool and its measurements, thresholds and results, with the aim of creating a singular tool to measure dyslexia across regions, nations, ethnicities and languages.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 283010 Eur

Project Coordinator

YORK ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL LIMITED & Country: UK

Project Partners

• CENTRUL PENTRU PROMOVAREA INVATARII PERMANENTE TIMISOARA ASOCIATIA
• Babel Idioma y Cultura S.L.
• Nome videregående skole, avd. Lunde
• Omolab komunikacije d.o.o.