Growth in normative reading outcomes in a school for dyslexic students.

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.While much is known about the cognitive and neurobiological basis of dyslexia, far less is known about the academic outcomes of specialized interventions provided by schools for dyslexic students.We report normative growth trajectories made by 143 students in Grades 2 through 5 on three norm-referenced reading-related progress measures: phonological awareness, vocabulary, and oral reading fluency over two testing sessions separated by intervals ranging from 9 months to 2 years at Louisiana Key Academy, a tuition-free public charter school for dyslexic students.Statistically significant gains in normative reading over testing sessions were found for all three measures with more dynamic growth rates than those obtained from a historical comparison group.These findings support the efficacy of specialized educational environments tailored to the needs of students with dyslexia and suggest that such models can narrow the reading achievement gap typically observed in this population.